2012: Back from Borneo

January is halfway over, and I’m long overdue to refresh my blog.  Two weeks ago, I said goodbye to my dad at the Suvarnibhumi airport, and since then, life has been a whirlwind of nametags and icebreaker games.  Has it only been two weeks back at school?  Has it already been two weeks?  Both are surprising.

Though we have four terms per year, and so four “term beginnings” of workshops and new classes, none is quite as busy as the real beginning of the year.  The weather might feel like it’s perpetually June, but there is a distinct sense of new beginning at work that reminds me it’s January.  Almost 100 new daytime scholarship students have come to begin their studies for the year, many of which will end in Australia or New Zealand, and the first weeks of getting to know each other, tone-setting, and orientations are reminiscent  of making group new year’s resolutions.  Many of our overarching messages to the students for the year–about reflection, active learning, goal-setting, and changing–are equally relevant to me in my role as a teacher.

This term I’m teaching two daytime classes, one on a year-long program that prepares Master’s candidates for their postgraduate study in Australia, in which I’m teaching Information Literacy (in other words, research skills), and the second on a six-month program that prepares government officials to better qualify to be accepted to the previous program.  I’m teaching them Learning Strategies (in other words, effective study skills).  In the evening, I’m teaching the second half of the Creative Writing course that I taught last term, and a children’s class (I like being able to have deeper conversations with most of my students…but what would I do with all of my stickers if I didn’t continue to teach some kids?!).

Toward the end of last year, I made the decision to stay on in Vientiane through the end of 2012 (at least), and so the new beginning of the school year has been a good time for me to renew my excitement about the 11 months ahead.  One of my personal resolutions has been to DO something more with all of the photos that have been accumulating by the thousands in my iPhoto for the past 16 months.  En masse, they are overwhelming, more than could be properly examined or posted on Facebook or on a blog.  So instead, each day, for the 350 remaining this year, I’ll be posting a single photograph I’ve taken somewhere in Asia, in no particular order, as a simple visual impression (unaccompanied by my ramblings).  The first 15 photos for the month of January are up, so feel free to peruse my Impressions, ทุกวัน (thuk wan means daily).

But before all of this, I was in the jungle with my dad.  Where were we?

Borneo.  The world’s third largest island, after Greenland and New Guinea (Australia doesn’t count…it’s the world’s smallest continent).  The island is split between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, and we visited just the northern Malaysian parts, which includes the states of Sabah and Sarawak.

In our “fourteen days of Christmas” spent in Malaysia, we saw 14+ wild pygmy elephants, 13 (thousand) feet of mountain, 12 meals of noodles, 11 proboscis monkeys, 10 story malls, 9 early mornings, 8 giant hornbills, 7 different flights, 6 hour bus rides, 5 Mulu caves, 4 orangutans, 3 million bats, 2 Petronas towers, and an epic sunrise over the clouds.  Whew!  Try singing that to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Before flying to Borneo, we spent a day and a half in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, a mall-filled, multicultural, sprawling city, with the former tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas twin towers.  If I thought there would be no signs of Christmas in this majority Muslim capital, one look into the nearest ten-story mall proved me wrong.  But we were all too happy to escape the craziness of KL for a different type of chaos–the noisy, humid, chaos of the jungle, of nights echoing with the sounds of bats and giant frogs.  The first stop: Mt. Kinabalu…