Sick not sick

 About a month ago I was diagnosed with Typhoid/Typhus/Tipes and a host of other same sounding names which pretty much all mean the same term. Happily since then I have been given the all clear of Typhus which is good but still I am not 100% right after all this time.

We did eventually go back to the hospital and I had another blood test and was declared free of Typhus and because I was still displaying symptons on the said illness the doctor rather worryingly prescribed me some Immodium just in case and some vitamins. I took the vitamins. There were useful. The Immodium is still in its shiny packaging and probably will never be taken.

You have to love taking tablets out here

Then last week I went back to the doctor as things are still not correct and luckily for me the doctor not only did not want to give me another blood test but he spoke nigh on perfect English and so I could tell him whats going on rather through my wife. And happily again he prescribed some more antibiotics to help clear everything up but with the information that I need to eat no vegetables or fruit or juice or coffee or fried stuff but to eat rice and meat and oats. What an exciting palette that leaves me to savour.
Since the advice I have had to have some coffee, because I need to start work early in the week and meat comes in burger buns and fries are never optional. Orange juice I could stop drinking though. Its not real orange juice but some manufactured crap full of water and sugar but its nice with digestive biscuits.

I turned the bed rest down what with one thing and another happening in and around my life and so I have been instructed to stop going to work so early, rest on the weekends and slow down a lot. I am sleeping as much as I can but if we take this week so far from Monday then its hard to see how I will be able to sleep much more.

Sunday night slept at 11pm and woke at 5 for work. Home by 8pm and bed by 10.30. This morning Jeremy is emptying his toys over my head at 5am and wont let me sleep any more  for the day. I will get home at 9.30 tonight (I started work at 11.30 today) and will be up again at 5am for more early classes. Who said anything about living the dream?

Due to this prolonged illness and fatigue I constantly have I missed a chance to take a weekend off and ride out with some colleagues to the west cost of Java some 300km round trip. That bit is disappointing but I do know it would not have helped me much with things and the last thing I want is more discomfort.  But I am sure there will be another time.

Finally time to moan about the traffic and the headache it is now causing me and will continue to do for at least the rest of the year. There is new elevated road being constructed on my way to work which will end on the main non tollway road from east Jakarta. This road is far too busy without any need for roadworks, so the fact the road has been reduced from 4 to 2 lanes in places (which includes a dedicated bus lane) and the police stand about and watch and are not seeming to do anything to divert traffic it is adding an extra 15 minutes to my journey. Now, I could ignore that and take the other main route to work but as there is an MRT being built and part of the same elevated road the traffic there is even worse. Add to it the fact that people are also looking to find less chaos on their way to work means the roads all around the area I live in are constant gridlock from 5am to 10pm.

Sort of stuff I ride in everday and its gets frustrating

Friday night there was a huge rain storm over the city which lasted a good few hours and this meant that my journey home time on a bike was 1.5 hours as every road I could take home was closed due to floods or traffic so I ended going way out of the way to get home, only to discover the street outside my house was full of broken down bikes which had failed to get through the 60cm floods all around my house. As much as I loathe to say it, roll on the dry season!!!

Jeremy at 22 Months

In 2 months time Jeremy will be 2. That has come round so quickly and everything has been now, thinking back, a blur.
In those 22 months he has grown and changed everyday and continues to delight and amaze me with his ability to learn, his activity and energy and his interest in everything.

 He has probably all his teeth. He likes to show me when he has finished eating by opening his mouth to tell me its empty. He tells me when he wants more, when there is something on the floor or an ant or something. He gets tissues and phones when asked and asks for water or milk.

He can sit still and watch TV for up to 10 minutes at a time before moving or running about and asks for Charlie and Lola on Cbeebies. He knows and can say some of the words to 'Steal My girl' by One direction (although that has nothing to do with me). He knows animals and which ones are scary, he growls, which ones are birds or cats, fish, dogs, bugs etc. Owls, Cats, Dogs, Bugs, Birds, Deer, Cow, Pigs, he can call by name or by sound.
Apples and bananas he can ask for.

He likes to scribble over everything. He can play with toy cars and make the noises. He fetches, he carries and he behaves most of the time.  For me all this is awesome and great to watch. He also loves buses, big and small. Toy or real and those really sad bus videos on You Tube when he will watch them and shout 'bus' at every moment a bus goes by. Buses are a big deal

He is past his allergy of lactose, he will eat almost anything. He will drink and eat almost everything he is given and will say no if he does not like it or want it.

Jeremy is now 14.4kg a little more than he was in October and is around 90cm a fair few centimeters taller than October and is fit and healthy. We had to take him to the Dr on Saturday because he had a week long cough and it was down to the common cold or flu virus and so medicine soon sorted that out. Carrying him around in the hospital he would point at the mothers with babies and say 'baybi' to them. Standing next to other little children he would touch their face but no in a bad way but it would be a little worrying for me. I have not seen him interact with other children and I really do not know how he behaves around them. He still has a long way to go before sharing with others really comes into his mind and he can rationalise things like that but I will teach best I can.

We now have TV downstairs and now he looks at the TV when it is on and expects it to be put on then and happily will get bored of it and go and do something and then go back to it if there something he likes. Baby TV and Cbeebies, Oggy and the Cockroaches and slowly but surely Gumball are his favourites and so I now know about Numtums, Charlie and Lola, Dinopaws, Sarah and Duck, etc The things you learn.

Our next adventure will be a train trip with him, a tricycle and having encouraging to speak more and make more sense.

His birthday will also be fantastic, and thats not long either.

Typhoid

Since January I have been having stomach and digestion problems and spent many an hour on the toilet wishing for a smell free day. Me being me, I considered it just a bout of food poisoning which is common here due to the lax hygiene routines in food preparation and really bad local toilets and dirty tap waterand oft badly stored but not cooked food. So I let things rumble on despite warnings from the wife that I should see a doctor and get it sorted out.

So on valentines day I decided to take my wife out for the evening to the hospital where we could while away the hours waiting to see a doctor. We went to the nearest one, which is Tria Dipa about 1km from my house and it is a good hospital and is well respected even if it does need a lick of paint.

The doctor I saw, seemed to know his stuff. I have met him before and he treated me for my back pains. You should know there are no GPs but doctors that you can see, therefore no real records or history of patients unless you keep returning to the same place. So to see the same doctor twice is a good thing I guess here.

I was told to go and have a blood test which was a first for me because I have never had a blood test before and after a syringe load of blood was removed, I had to wait 20 minutes while it was tested for the chance of Typhoid Fever or Tyhoid. One is never quite sure what it is out here but to mention you have 'Tipes' or Typhoid and you are instantly considered ill and wished a speedy recovery. There was also a chance that I would be admitted to hospital which I was not too impressed with, Yovita even less so and with having to stump up a large deposit first to get a bed I was not looking forward at all to that prospect.

1 form does it all for the tests in hospital

Back to the doctor for the result and I was told, it was Typhoid and I needed to rest not eat fried food and drink as much water as I humanly could before saying everything was OK and goodbye.

This ones says TY-O is + positive rather than negative

We were given a big bag of antibiotics and a letter declaring I needed 5 days bed rest. Bed rest being made to rest in a bed and off home we went.

Bed rest is boring and almost impossible with my son who is  not sick and wants to play and jump and crawl and play more with me all the time I was at home. So I spent my rest with him taking life easy resting at home and sleeping more when he slept so much so by the following weekend I felt so so much better. The drugs worked, the water worked and the rest definitely was a good thing.

Jeremy behaving while I was resting

Ironically, the doctor said that Typhoid was common for westerners to catch in Indonesia and looked a little lost when he was told I have been here for 8 years and only had the flu a few times and some back problems. But then he said my blood pressure was good for my age and my heart was strong so that was good.

So what is Typhoid?

Wikipedia describes it like this

"Typhoid fever — also known simply as typhoid^[1] — is a common worldwide bacterial disease transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica, serovar Typhi."

So now you know. Happily the antibiotics kicked in and cleared it up and I am back at work and the world continues to revolve. And just maybe I will go to the doctors next time a little sooner!!!!

Happy Birthday EF

Somedays its hard to imagine that EF English First is 50 years old and that it was created a Swedish man with a vision and who saw a gap in the then developing tourist market and exploited it to the max.

 

But EF (Education First and its other familiar name English First) is 50. And last Tuesday we had a party.

This is I think, the only corporate birthday I have ever attended. A global party for all employees to attend and all at the same time. I imagine non Islamic countries enjoyed sparkling wine and champagne as the toast. I enjoyed the grape juice. Our party was for all the staff who work in the building for EF, which meant all teachers and staff and the administration people who live upstairs.

Decked out in our very best EF t-shirts, we listened to a short welcome and then watched a few videos about EF and its history plus how the organisation got into the Guinness book of records for the most people who participated in a dance world wide.

Cake and lunch then followed by the inevitable round of photos.

Somedays its good to belong to something.

The video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mramrpw7A4A#t=111

Floods in Jakarta

Well after 2 months of threatening the city with floods of near biblical proportions it finally happened. The city has in some places been flooding in areas since Christmas but this week with a high tide from the north,  heavy rains in the mountains in the south and torrential rain in the city, Jakarta in places finally became overloaded and the place flooded and ground to a standstill. It should be noted that this happens pretty much every year, and more than once. However, it being the rainy season the expectation is that the rain is worse, the floods bigger and the chaos more than the rest of the year and this year for some it has been.

The rains started over the weekend and on the Monday I had to be at school by 6am to go into the city for my school classes. It rained all the way from home to EF and then carried on into the morning at St.Ursula. There was a power cut for a while and then after around 9am the rain began to fall at a rate which you realise is going cause problems for people.
At 11am, parents were picking up there children from the school to get them home and the school itself started to flood. By 12 noon, my classes were cancelled and I was free to go (where?) back to EF for the day. Happily I work with another teacher whose classes were also cancelled so we waded out of the school without shoes and socks to Dunkin Doughnuts to wait for the driver who did arrive around 1.5 hours later. While waiting we watched the rain and floods rise.

My bike in the rain

The gloomy skies out side my school at 6am

St.Ursula in the rain

The floods starting inside the school

Leaving the school

The floods outside the school

Getting Deeper

The trip to EF was on clear roads but I had 3 teachers unable to come into the school on the Monday due to the weather. On the way home from EF I encountered the biggest floods I have ridden through ever and that was exciting but happily I made it. It was hard to do as the water was higher than my front wheel. But other than that, the traffic was very light.

The view from one my teachers houses

One of my teachers took this while trying to get to EF

Another view

The rain calmed down on Tuesday and I only had 2 teachers absent due to floods but they returned on Wednesday. The city itself got back to normal from Tuesday night and since then there has been no real heavy rain but there are many people claiming the rain will return this weekend or in the next week or so.  Lets see.

This was a 1km away from where I work

The city itself was stuck. The buses, trains and taxis stopped running. Large parts of the city was under 50-80cm of water and these are government areas, business areas as well as residential areas. Still it happens every year and every year nothing really changes, it just continues to rain and the floods come and go.

And some endearing photos of why I like Jakarta. People never give up.

From voanews,com

from floodlist.com

from thewatchers.adorraeli.com

Working as a teacher

Next year, I will celebrate 10 years away the UK and the year after 10 years of teaching. But for now I will settle for 8 years.

I have worked for EF since coming to Indonesia and overall it has been simply a magical experience and I am not even being paid to write this. My role has always been teaching and whilst I have become a Director Studies/Principal/Academic Controller whatever, my role is one to teach and to improve teaching and therefore to improve the levels of English of those that come to my center which is in Puri Indah, West Jakarta..

Thinking back over the years I have done some pretty random things which seem to continue, therefore it is coming the normal.

Here are some of things I have found myself doing (in no more particular order)

1. Judging Fancy dress
2. Judging a Rap contest
3. Making Hamburgers in McDonalds
4. Teaching in a school where the students would play football at the back of the class and ignore me completely
5. Teach in Head offices of Banks through the City
6. Present my School in some of the number 1 companies in Indonesia
7. Tell and make a room full of adults sing the alphabet when challenged to how I would make their children learn English.
8. Hold a puppet show for 6 year olds who actually yawned and cheered when the puppets were thrown in the bin
9. Watching highly paid banking professionals pay tag around their office as they were bored.
10. Judge 5 year olds reading poetry
11. Teach in the number 1 Catholic school in the country
12. Teach in the best Islamic school in the country
13. Break up parents fighting
14. Stop the kids from fighting
15. Play a dead body in a murder mystery
16. Tell really scary stories to the students every halloween
17. Teach in another business where every morning I arrived I was given coffee and croissants to help me wake up
18. When I was teaching in the city, both the staff in the cafe in the basement and Wendys fast food staff learned what I like to order and would ask if I wanted my normal.
19. Presented teaching skills to University lectures
20. Sat and ate Crocodile Satay and snake soup with a class of business students
21. Had to deal with first aid emergencies resulting in taking various staff to hospital
22. Standing in Shopping malls handing out leaflets
23. Spending countless hours in the airport waiting for new teachers
24. Killing mice in the teachers house
25. Giving presentation lessons to children and as a result losing part of my hearing
26. Administering trial testing and lessons to help provide data for new courses
27. Provide Interviews for EF websites
28. Teaching high school teachers grammar and structure even though they have been teaching far longer than me
29. Read to children in a book store
30. Giving guided city tours and finding more random places to go

and so on,

Of course I also do my day job of teaching different classes and age groups and talking about Grammar and structures and singing and dancing and helping students to develop their skills as well I hope, the teachers that I work with improve theirs. And the teachers here are the best I have had the pleasure to work with and with they have all been here at least a year for the western ones and my Indonesian teachers range from 4 years to a week. Hats off to the those who have put up with me for that long, it shows how cultures are different. Mind they don't have to deal with me first thing so I guess that helps.

As for EF, it has changed so much since I have started working here. Gone have the crappy old Apple Macs (which are lying in a garage somewhere would be worth selling on Ebay!!) and the bad EF books and CD players. In have come, up to the date media loaded programs for students from 3 to what ever. Clearly I cant load the videos from one of courses which were made by Cartoon Network however if you click this link, it takes you to a place where you can watch one.

http://www.bascon-art.com/162484/4651783/gallery/high-flyers-animation-background-artist

We have interactive whiteboards, Apple Apps and all our books have been written in collaboration with Cambridge University. EF works with Harvard, Peking and Moscow University as well and I am sure many others. In Indonesia there are over 65 centers and it is growing. Does that make the teaching any easier? Well, not really but it makes it more fun and interactive and at the end of the day, the kids like it.

All the teachers still need to plan lessons and ensure that they use the materials provided and that the students are given the best chance learn English and practice it. All with a sense of fun and that is another reason I enjoy working here, the fun and energy that the place has. The amount of work and effort everyone is under pinned by the amount of noise the teachers make and laughter the teachers room generates makes for a perfect day.

A snippet of life at where I work. Always a challenge but a worthwhile and for any of my teachers reading this, yes that is called praise.

The teachers, oh and me, Christmas 2014 (courtesy of Liana)