09-09-09 Just another day on the planet

September 09, 2009

I was just sitting there, starred blankly at the green blackboard (I don’t know why they call it blackboard anyway). The teacher explained about grammar teaching enthusiastically, but I could not see the importance of it and how it would help bring us to a better world. There were millions people in the world who live in poverty, and a there are a number of children from developing countries whose life cannot be saved due to hunger. And at that time, my heart really went for them.

It was still summer, and surely it was hot and humid outside. It was September, but in Islamic Calendar it was Ramadan, the holy month in the Lunar Calendar. During the month, Moslems are obliged to fast from dusk to dawn. I started fasting since I was still six years old, but I would always remember Ramadan 2009 as the hardest one in my life. The days were longer that they used to back home in Indonesia, and the heat seemed to be more intense. As a good Moslem, I was supposed to forget the hunger and relate the feelings to modesty and sacrifices. But the intensified heats hallucinated me, and the hunger made me forget about grammar and led me to concern more about poverty in developing countries. I then began to question whether I should shift my career focus from being an English teacher into being a volunteer and worked for the United Nations.

Unfortunately, the class was over and I had to wake up from the daydream and rush to my office in the Department of Linguistics. Apart from it’s being so unbearably hot, the day was similar to any other days in my graduate life. There were piles of papers to read, and several meetings with Professors. I really needed to discuss the possibility of conducting a research about language lost back in Indonesia, but apparently, there were several considerations that I should be concerned about before I could assume I could enjoy a month of fieldwork in my home country. My advisor told me that it would be better for me to do something here in the United States instead of doing it overseas. Ah, changing my research topic into something else was not easy, and it was tearing me apart. But that’s life, and obstacles were always said to be the joy of the holy Ramadan. So I spent the rest of the day crying on my bed, but I promised I would be working hard to finish my degree so I could see my family and my loved one back home soon.