Great Expectations.

keluarga,

I just rode an angkot from the metal footstep up into the cab, my feet skimming the asphalt below me. It's the best way to ride, just outside the claustrophobic confines of the inner pleather benches, the wind whipping at your ponytail with one hand hooked securely through the door latch. I love it. I will miss it. Secretly I sometimes pray for overcrowding and endless traffic, just so the option is available.

Luckily, Jakarta has both requisites in abundance, and as I'm back in the Ibu Kota for tomorrow's PLD, the prayers of several weeks were answered in my twenty minute hitch-hike from Ambassador Mall (It is Sister Christensen's birthday and she is celebrating by replacing all her old white shirts with new white shirts at her half-way mark) to the Tebet warnet (where everything is familiar again and the sunset fell rosy-red against the golden mosque dome across the street and a circus' worth of children followed me to the door—Hello, Mister! Hey, hey mister! Was you naim?). We came in early today, P-Day a good excuse for a morning train across misty-blue rice fields and a few hours main with the JakSel sisters, so we've had a lovely afternoon of taxis and busses and angkot and the general to and fro that is the city. Sometimes I think I miss it. Then we get stuck in traffic and I retract all sentimental musings. Then I get off in Kampung Melayu and there is the gorengan I love and the crumbling concrete corners along blackened and broken storefronts and the bus named Naomi and it all comes back again. It is interesting, every time I return. I get the smallest sense of what it will be like, one day, to miss all of Indonesia—and I don't like it, not one bit. It's a lot of emotions all wrapped up into something quite impossible to clarify or catalog, except that I know it will hurt. A lot.

Remember how I grew up always pretending? Pretending that I lived under gypsy shanties or plantation prerogative or one hundred years in the past? Because actually I have always really wanted to experience another day, another age. So for a long while—well, all of life, actually—I figured my future was in Europe, in the cobblestoned byways and quaint remnants of those imaginings, countries that still offered up my childhood intrigues though centuries had now passed. That's what I thought. And then there it was, Indonesia Jakarta. And who ever put me in Indonesia Jakarta? Or in Asia at all? But something about reading that call, about knowing that future, made a lot of sense. Like something I'd worked towards long ago but since forgotten, now restored to me in new glory. It felt (and how cliché is this?) right. A feeling which in itself didn't make sense, because, again: Jakarta? Indonesia?

And then I came here, and I loved it. From the very beginning, I loved it. And as I continue to learn to love it even more, I'm beginning to find pieces of myself I never even imagined to be buried here—in the language, in the landscape, and then, this week, in the past. Because in Indonesia, I don't get to simply observe the cobblestones or consider the villages of days gone by. I am living them. Right now. The past in the present. We live in labyrinthine neighborhoods I imagine would be akin to the London Dickens knew. Occasionally we have to take a horse-drawn carriage to reach an investigator. For fruit and vegetables and fresh cuts of meat we wander through open markets amidst the urban sprawl, stench and sweet scent existing side by side as sewer runs along crates fresh from the countryside. Yesterday I was lugging our enormous kitchen kettle from stovetop to shower in my daily attempt to make the mountain water somewhat less survivable in the early morning and I just laughed out loud. Isn't this everything I always wanted to do? I am my own version of 1900 House.

Which then leads me to another thing that we all know but I usually forget: God knows us so much more fully and entirely than we ever fully appreciate. A thought I will leave up to you to connect to all of the above as Presiden wants us back at Senopati and this is it for now and until next week. Bandung is the best, I am sleeping slightly better (five hours last night!) and on Saturday nights I sing Beatles songs with the busker trio across the street from the Church. Oh, Indonesia. I can't wait to share this all with you. I love you.

Sister E.