Indonesia is, if nothing, a land of contrast and contradiction: it's there on a public minibus decked out with flashing lights and blasting house mashups that conjure images of Bollywood on an acid trip, filled with veiled women going to market in the early morning; it's there when a rice farmer tilling the fields he has inherited from his father's fathers taps a quick status update into his Blackberry during an afternoon respite; the contrast is brutal in the capital, where malls dripping with Gucci and Chanel back onto slums dripping poverty and human waste.
Here, some of my students get bored waiting their turn to perform at a traditional arts competition. It's not lost on me that these girls are in fact wearing contrasting outfits. The point here, however, is that these ladies cruised Twitter and Facebook on their phones for the better part of the day, pausing only to take the stage and dance with far more grace than I'll ever see them commit to their English exercises.
