Stuff...

Today I helped Ibu Misiah make lasagna. She’s made it before, but we didn’t really like it as she put a couple layers with cheese sauce in it. So I wanted to make it the way I make it back home. So I splurged on sauce, noodles, and ricotta cheese. No such thing as cottage cheese here. Anyways, wherever you are in the world, lasagna is a fairly pricey dish to make. Because my helpers have worked for Americans for quite a few years, they have developed a taste for American food. However, because lasagna is so expensive, they only eat it about once a year. They were telling me that right now European food is very trendy here so they like to teach their kids to like it and to know it so that when they go out and eat it with friends they can eat it. Basically, they are trying to make sure that their kids aren’t kampung kids. Kampung kids are kids that don’t know what’s going on in the world and who only eat rice and other traditional food and don’t dress trendy etc…. I found it so funny that they feel it is so important that their kids like our food as though it is so much better than theirs. That is so much the view here. Anything from outside the country is good and anything that is made within, but export quality is good. So you’ll see a lot of signs in stores proclaiming that their wares are export quality!
Now I just want to have a little gripe session. The longer we live here, things that didn’t really bother me before, have started to bug me. Number one, there is not one single closet in this entire house. There is only one armoire and it is in the boys bedroom. There are cupboards at the end of a few of the beds, but you can’t open them as long as there are sheets and blankets on the beds, and they are rather gross inside, so we don’t use them. My kitchen is sooo small. The upper cupboards are where I store containers for leftovers, all my dishes and some dried spices and even the frying pans and freezer bags etc… Don’t ask how I fit it all in…. Underneath the sink is taken up by a gas tank for my “stove” and my actual “oven” on the other side. The rest of the space is used for pans and some big bowls and baking sheets. In the dining room is a kind of pantry where we store the rest of the dried goods. So that is it for storage. There is stuff piled up everywhere, it is starting to drive me nuts… I have to admit though, the longer we live here, the nicer this house seems. I guess that’s because everyone else around us has much smaller and less convenient houses. If you look at our family photo on the left of the screen you will see four different houses. The one on the far left is our house. At the back you can see a small balcony with a little roof, that is a different house. To the right of that one is another house, which thankfully has been unoccupied the entire time we’ve lived here, on the far right is a pink house and that is where Bilal and Gerda live, although Gerda sleeps at her grandparents house, the one with the little balconey, as there is only one bedroom in their house. A few feet in front of us, you can’t see it on the photo of course, is another house. So you can how close we are living to everyone around us. Sometimes that bothers me, like when my neighbour decides to have a heated conversation on his phone at 11:00 at night, outside, in front of his house. Sometimes it really feels like camping here…. And of course, the fact that we have absolutely no yard, just a few square feet of tiled space only large enough to store a motorbike, is becoming old. I’m so ready for the kids to have a yard to play in. Okay, I’ve griped long enough, we’re just getting sick of school and sick of living with someone else’s stuff etc…. It is getting harder and harder to stay motivated to study. We love living here, but our goal is to live and work in Papua, and that’s where our crates are currently headed, if they don’t sink to the bottom of the ocean…