America the Beautiful, Part 2

After leaving the shrunken heads in Oklahoma we drove across Missouri to visit the iconic St. Louis arch.  Before visiting the arch, we checked into our hotel, a Homewood Suites, which is now my favorite hotel chain.  Not only do you get an awesome breakfast, but a buffet dinner on some nights, as well.  It's all about the food, and also all six of us had a bed to sleep on - no one on the floor.  I digress...

All of us but Carter - who suffers from acrophobia, enjoyed the ride to the top of the arch.  The sun was setting over St. Louis and the view was beautiful.

Lovin' it!

Hatin' it.





The next day we visited the St. Louis Zoo, which was free!  Gotta love those free attractions.  Our kids consider themselves zoo conniseurs, and they rated this zoo up there with Singapore's. 

Touching stingrays

Seeing this hornbill reminded us of our Borneo home

As did this critter

From St. Louis we drove south to Nashville and stayed with my older brother and his family for a few days...

...then we went on to north Georgia and stayed with my younger brother and his family.

Finally, after two weeks on the road, we made it to southern Georgia.  We've enjoyed time with our parents.



Driving the golf cart with Granpa

Playing the piano with Grandma

And David caught this huge fish in the lake. I love how it looks like the fish is swallowing the dog!

Bop and Luke have a lego-building competition.

So we have a few weeks to catch our breath before we hit the road again.  We're in our third week of home school, and we've spoken at four churches so far.  This past Sunday David and I took turns getting emotional as we spoke at a church; the emotions of saying goodbye to so many dear friends in Inodnesia are still quite raw. 

Until next time...





America the Beautiful, Part 1

Fourteen states.

Fourteen different beds.

Fourteen thousand times we heard "Are we there yet?"

Our first big road trip is behind us, and what a trip it's been.  We've been reminded along the way of many of the things we love about our home country.

Water fountains.  Automatic soap dispensers.  The ease with which you can do laundry, wash dishes, and get an internet connection.  Berries.  Family.

There have been the normal return-to-America adjustments.  The need to remember the right side of the road to drive on.  Clearing away our own garbage at fast food restaurants.  Remembering not to feel offended if someone hands me something with his left hand.

The adjustments have been hardest for the youngest one.  Zoe - who last visited her passport country when she was three - has virtually no memory of the U.S.  She keeps asking me what island we are on.  I had to pull out the atlas and show her the big "island" of America. 

She also keeps asking me when we're going to have "normal" food.  The rest of us can't get enough of frosted shredded wheat, Chik-Fil-A, and deli meat, and poor Zoe just wants some nasi (rice). 

She is learning that the U.S. flag is not just displayed on July 4th ("Look, Mom, there's the Fourth of July flag"), that everyone around us can understand English and we can't just talk openly about them (a few embarrassing incidents with that one), and that we can take books from the library FOR FREE.  She was totally amazed.

And so am I.  This is truly an amazing country, a good bit of which we got to see on our long drive.  After Hawaii we flew to the mainland and were met by my parents who drove their van out from Georgia.  Wasn't that nice?  My dad kept saying he was going to look for an old beat-up station wagon to drive out, so that my children could experience road trips like I did - no seat belts, am radio, no a.c., and a car top carrier.

Instead they drove out in their Honda Odyssey (which does have a car top carrier), then flew back to Georgia so we could ride in style.  Our first stop was my Aunt Brenda's place in northeastern Oregon, where we grazed in her garden, went on a boat trip down the river (saw a bear!), and watched lightning strike a tree and catch it on fire. 

Foraging

Our Catch

From Oregon it was on to MAF's headquarters in Nampa for a few days, then on east to Colorado.  We spent a week with David's brothers and their families.  The kids had so much fun reconnecting with their cousins.

With cousin Rachel



Zoe and Pharoah

With the Fort Collins cousins

The road trips of my childhood consisted of driving to out of the way places to visit free (or nearly free) points of interest.  I wanted my kids to experience the same.  Driving east through Colorado we passed through the little town of Burlington and stopped to ride the historic Kit Carson County Carosel.  25 cents a pop. 105 degrees.

This carosel, made in the early 1900s, had some unusual animals for a merry-go-round - lions, tigers, dogs, zebras, and a giraffe with a boa constrictor wrapped around its neck.  Yeah, a little creepy.

Speaking of creepy, I should warn you, gentle reader, that there is a picture of shrunken heads coming up.  If that kind of thing makes you squeamish you may want to quickly scroll through the pictures. 

From Colorado we headed on to Kansas, where we visited one of the home sites of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  This site, near Independence, is where her book Little House on the Prairie was set.    The number of minivans with car-top carriers in the parking lot attested to the fact that it's one of many Little House sites that faithful readers make a pilgrimage to see.

"Pa, the rabbit stew and corn pone are done!"

A replica cabin on the site where the Ingalls family lived.  Looks the same as it did when I visited in '83.

We met Laura in the gift shop.

After Little House, we went on to the Woolaroc Museum.  Now, this is a place that has lived large in my imagination since my family visited when I was a wee lass of eight.  My father wanted to visit this particular museum because it housed the world's largest collection of shrunken heads.  As a kid, the heads both fascinated and repulsed me.  So of course I had to take my own kids there.

I think we chose the hottest day in Oklahoma history to visit - it was 110 in the shade.  The parking lot was eerily empty, but the museum was gloriously air-conditioned.  Once inside we headed straight for the head display...which, no pun intended, seemed to have shrunk since I was eight. 

 Are you ready? 

Here they are...

The heads were from South America, and just were too little to seem real.  Completely creeped out, we didn't linger long at the display, which - in my eight-year-old's mind - had taken up a whole wall of the museum.

The rest of the museum is full of Wild West paintings and Native American artifacts. 

Next post:  St. Louis to the Atlantic!

Hawai'i

The horrible goodbyes are behind us.  And they were horrible.  I'm not quite ready to blog about our last week in Tarakan just yet...I need some more time to pass so I can type without crying. 

But what I AM ready to blog about is beautiful Hawai'i!  We arrived last Thursday after traveling through Balikpapan, Singapore, and Tokyo.  The flights went fine - it's amazing how much easier it is to travel now that the kids are older - no pacifiers, diapers, etc. - everyone carrying their own bag, and a few able to help tote the big bags. 

Zoe really enjoyed the water fountains and automatic soap dispensers at the airports we traveled through.  It doesn't take much to give our kids a thrill.

Our reason for traveling to Hawai'i was to visit our supporting church, Berean Bible, on the Big Island.  You can read more about them here.  They arranged for us to stay in a fantastic beach house situated right on rugged lava-rock cliffs.  All day the waves crashed into the cliffs, sending up salt spray and creating the most sopophoric sounds to sleep to.  There it is.  My favorite SAT word.  Have to use it when I can.

From the heights of the world's largest mountain to the roiling depths of an active volcano, we took in several of the amazing sights the Big Island has to offer.  We drove to see the beautiful Akaka Falls, which reminded me very much of some waterfalls we've seen in East Kalimantan.

One night we drove to Volcanoes National Park to see the lava glow.  We wrapped up like bedoins (57 degrees feels cold to our thin jungle blood!) and sat for as long as the kids could endure (about five minutes) and viewed the red-hot caldera.

Another night we headed up the slopes of Mauna Kea, Hawai'i's iconic mountain that is renowned as the world's best place for viewing the stars.  We went up to the visitor's center at 9,000 feet and waited for the sun to set so we could hopefully do some stargazing.

The view was incredible, and once the sun set and the clouds cleared we had a crystal-clear view of the stars.  The moon was quite bright, so we couldn't see the Milky Way, but a telescope view of the moon made up for that, and the kids were excited to see Saturn's rings through a telescope.

We didn't shiver the whole time we were on the Big Island...we did manage to get in the water some.  The place where we stayed had a minature pool, and we got to swim in a lagoon with friends from the church.

On Sunday we shared a presentation about our work with MAF at the Berean church.  Since we last visited there in 2004 they had constructed a lovely church building that is perfect for the tropics.  They opened up side doors and let the breeze blow through. After the service we were treated to a pot luck lunch, and some Hawaiin music.  One of the ladies even taught me a simple hula dance - so much fun!

The two ladies in the picture below sang for about an hour.  It was the quentessential Hawaiin experience for me - sitting, enjoying the breeze, chatting with long-time Hawaii residents, listening to this beautiful music.  We really enjoyed our time there.

This morning we flew back to Honolulu and went to Pearl Harbor to visit the U.S.S. Arizona memorial.



We then headed to downtown Waikiki to eat at a restaurant we saw a blurb about on one of our flights that the tv food guy Anthony Bourdain visited, the Puka Dog.

Buns are toasted on these sharp burners, then filled with different relishes, like mango and pineapple.

David is taking suitcases down to the hotel lobby, so this is it for now.  We're hoping to drive up to the North Shore, see the surfers, and eat some shave ice before heading to the airport to catch our overnight flight to the mainland.

Aloha!

What a crazy couple of days it’s been.

Yesterday was Pack the Container Day.  We are shipping our stuff to Papua via a 20-foot container, so Monday night David and I were up past one, boxing up and wrapping our worldly goods.  I was hanging out laundry at midnight, having just remembered my aprons hanging on the back of a cabinet.  You’d be surprised at how much noise there is at midnight here – roosters crowing, toads croaking, the night watchman banging out the hour on a pole. 

Tuesday morning a crew arrived to help take our stuff to the dock where the container is.  In just a couple hours all the stuff was gone.

The truck is loaded.  Note the sweet grafitti.

It is a relief to have a bare house, after the craziness of packing up.  And yet it is sad, too.  Our voices bouncing off the walls, and the early morning light coming in earlier than usual because of the lack of curtains attest that our house is EMPTY. 

My sentimental side has kicked in, and allowed a floodgate of memories to hit me when I am already feeling emotionally vulnerable.  I stood in our playroom/schoolroom yesterday, and thought of all the playing and learning my kids did in that room.  In the kids’ bedroom, by the door, are the fading marks of where we’ve marked their growth over the years, the first mark for Grace – now a gangly 11-year-old – barely two feet off the floor.

Our kids learned to talk, walk, ride a bike, read…so many things in this house.  Leaving here is the end of an era for our family – the end of the Holstens With Small Kids Era.  And while there are some awesome perks to having older kids, I am sad to leave the small kid era.

And Orpa is pregnant, and I am bummed that I may never get to hold her baby, my “grandchild” if you will.  Many Indonesians wish to have children right away after tying the knot – sort of making their family or the marriage complete, I guess – and Orpa and Herry were no different.  She and I have had our first good cry – she flung herself on me the other day and I held her as she sobbed, “Oh Ibu, I never got much love from my own parents…it wasn’t until I lived with you that I truly felt loved.”  So yeah, this goodbye is going to be pretty tough.  She made soto ayam (Indonesian chicken soup) for us one last time yesterday, which was sooooo good.  So good that we had it again for breakfast this morning.

Comfort food

Monday was kind of an insane day – David flew one last time in the Krayan region, and there was room for Zoe and I to go along.  The plan was to drop a load of passengers in Long Bawan, then another load in Long Layu, then head over to Paupan where one of our adopted families lives.  We were hoping to be back in Tarakan by 2 so we could get back to packing. 

Alas, it never seems to go according to plan when you really need it to.  The load of passengers was a group of immigration officials who wanted to hang out in Long Bawan for a little while before heading over to Long Layu.  So we had to wait while they did their visits – but we were invited along so we had a meal, which I was happy about.  Any chance to eat the wonderful short-grain rice of that region, along with a side of wild ferns, I take it.

With the immigration officials

On one leg of our trip Zoe got to sit up front with David and “fly” the plane.  She is our fearless one and was more than excited to go “weightless”.

When we finally got to Paupan, we had to rush it a bit.  Zoe and I went on a little walk, and I hope this doesn’t sound weird, but I was able to say goodbye to the beautiful wild jungle of Borneo.  Our “father” in Paupan, Pak Ajang, hosted a little goodbye meeting for us, which was followed by a meal.  He and his family rode with us back to Tarakan, where they will wait for the birth of their second child.  Their older son, Bryan, is 14 and will be living in Tarakan to go to high school.  For years they've wanted a second child, and it's finally happened.

Pak Ajang (standing) formally bids us farewell

Goodbye Borneo! (photo by Zoe)

A Dilemma

What to do with the dog?

Sandy

Sandy, our beloved mutt with the face of a fruit bat, will not be able to accompany us to our new home in Papua.  We acquired her after the unfortunate demise of our first dog, Sydney, who was accidentally given away to be eaten for Christmas dinner.  No joke!


For eight years she has guarded our home well - sometimes, a little too well.  She's a barking fool, as my neighbors can attest, and as she gets older and grumpier the barking has gotten worse. 

Carter and Grace with little Sandy, 2003

Unfortunately, because of her incessant barking, she scares the hooey out of most Indonesians.  I feel badly about that, and we try to put her up when we know people are coming over.  


So no one really wants her, and I would be hesitant to give her away, actually, knowing how she can be with strangers.  I don't want her biting anyone.  There is also the very real possibility that if I give her to someone, they would eat her.  And one of our dogs getting eaten is enough.  If there were a humane society or animal shelter here, I would probably take her there, but alas, no such option exists.


So, sadly, we will probably have her put down.  Our friend, Tim, has offered to do this after we leave.  As he  said, "Hey, that's what friends are for - we kill each other's pets."  


Another sad goodbye.  Poor Sandy.  She's been a good dog, even if she has driven me half-nuts with her barking.  

The Goodbyes Begin

The painful process of pulling up our deeply-embedded roots from East Kalimantan has begun.  Our first few years in Tarakan, I would have had a hard time imagining myself depressed at the thought of moving away.  There were times when I could have left and not looked back.  But the longer we stayed the more betah or at home we have felt.


 For months I've been saying to myself, a la Scarlett O'Hara, "I won't think about packing and saying goodbye right now - I'll think about that tomorrow."  Tomorrow has arrived and our goodbyes are beginning. I have always been a sentimental sap - in part thanks to my dad who would often say things to me like, "This is your last Thursday as a third-grader" or "That's the last turkey sandwich you'll eat as a 13-year-old." Silly stuff, but it did ingrain in me the need to "mark the moment" be that moment the end of third grade, or a move across the country.  So my next few posts will "mark the moment" and hopefully help me process the goodbyes in a healthy way so I'm not a mess at the airport when we leave.


Monday I flew with David for the last day of his operational flying in the Apo Kayan region of East Kalimantan.  He wanted to "pamit" or officially take leave of his friends in the villages there, per local custom.  There is also a cultural tradition to "minta maaf" or ask forgiveness from your friends for any possible sins committed against them.  So in each of the villages David gave a little speech about how much he is going to miss the people there, how thankful he is for their friendship, and to forgive him for any possible misunderstandings.

Getting ready to take off in the Kodiak

 David with Taman Bang ("father of Bang") in the village of Mahak Baru.  Taman Bang and his sister, long-time airstrip agents, are good friends of the MAF pilots.  They usually have lunch waiting for the pilot, and Monday was no different.  We feasted on fried chicken, rice, sauteed pakis (ferns), and - what Mahak Baru is famous for - fresh pineapple.  The pineapples from Mahak are the best!!!  

 Taman Bang hacks into a freshly picked nanas (pineapple).

Me with Taman Bang and his daughter.  Taman Bang's sister gave me the necklace.

David receives an ornately-decorted machete from the village elders.

As we flew to other villages, we were likewise showered with kind words and gifts - baskets, hats, sugar cane.  I got choked up watching David fight tears as he said goodbye to friends he's known for almost ten years. 

Flying home that afternoon, my eyes hungrily took in the miles and miles of lush, pristine jungle and I thought of the people who live in the little villages below. Their lives are directly impacted by MAF - like the woman who was one of our passengers that morning.  She told me how she was returning to her village after going to Tarakan for treatment for a miscarriage.  She and her husband have hoped for a baby for five years, and were very disappointed over their recent loss.  "But," she said, "I am so thankful the MAF plane came to get me when it did."

Laden with gifts from interior

 The goodbyes continued today with the departure of Dorkas, a young woman who has lived with our family for the past three years.  She is our house helper Orpa's younger sister, and she worked for us part-time while attending a local high school.  She just graduated, and today she departed for her home island of Sulawesi where she hopes to go to nursing school.  She was a great help to us, and has such a sweet spirit about her.  We will miss her, especially Zoe who would spend hours playing with her in the back yard.

 So I'm hoping that by crying a little bit over the next few weeks, I'll save myself from the really big ugly cry that's been building.