Due to the release of the film version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, I decided to re-publish several posts originally on the Relief Journal blog. I hope you enjoy them.

The dark-eyed toddler clutched the mango, squatting barefoot on the counter top next to a basket of fruit. She stared at me, unblinking, her eyes wide. I smiled at her. I knew it wasn’t everyday an American woman like me walked into the market of this remote mountain village in Indonesia.

Before I traded my Miss for a Mrs., I traveled to the other side of the world to teach English in a private elementary school in Ujung Pandang, the capital of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. If you look at a map of the country, the island Sulawesi is most easily described as a floppy letter K. Today renamed Makassar, it’s still labeled Ujung Pandang (or Ujungpandang) on the map here.

When not in the classroom, I explored the city or went to the beach. Sometimes to the mountains. Hot, crowded Ujung Pandang buzzed with Vespa scooters and mini-buses. Everywhere I went – children.

Camera-ready kids, a shy first grader and funny beggars

Meeting children proved easy.

At the Bantimurung waterfall, a nearby tourist attraction, an energetic pack of youngsters playing in the water rushed to meet me. They all wanted their picture taken. My students in the classroom – loud and just as fun loving. So cute in their red and white uniforms. One first grade girl I imagined taking home with me. She was quiet, shy. Probably afraid of the giraffe American who talked English too fast.

I wonder what happened to her.

Then there are the children part of me doesn’t want me to remember. The way-too-young beggars at the Central Market in the heart of the city. One boy without a hand. Another foreigner told me parents were known to cut off a hand or foot, just so the child could beg.

I bantered back and forth with those children, making them laugh. I asked their names, impressing them with my growing Bahasa Indonesia language skills.

I never did ask about their parents.

The children at the shops were friendlier than the beggars in front of the post office. Like beggar kids needed to be friendly, entertaining to me. If anyone should be cranky, it’s them.

A wrong bus and Pizza Hut

I once got on the wrong bus, taking me to a section of the city I’d never seen before. Shacks of tin sat too close to the road. Hundreds of them. Hard to believe families lived in little more than a one-room metal chubby. Like the girl with the mango, I stared openly, glad for the window buffer between me and that foreign world.

Later I saw homes far removed from the tin shacks. A wide iron gate across the driveway was not uncommon for those upscale homes with their high walls and landscaped front yard with tropical flowers. I admired those houses as if I were buying real estate.

I ate at Pizza Hut. Same pizza we eat here in New Jersey. The big difference: the bottle of Sambal sauce on the table. I grew to love the spicy sauce on my pizza too.

Looking back

It’s the littlest things that trigger a memory. I can’t look at bamboo, papaya or an orchid without thinking of Indonesia. Not too long ago, a magazine I picked up in the bookstore pictured a durian on it’s back cover. In Indonesia, we attracted a giggling crowd when we tried the white, fleshy fruit the locals believed to act like an aphrodisiac.

I still have the pictures of the children at the waterfall. The snapshot of the little girl with the mango is worthy of National Geographic. I could scan them, put the best on the Internet, share them with you. But that seems wrong somehow, like I’m pimping them out.

I have no photos of the beggar children and now – 10 years later – I wish I did. Their faces fade the longer I’m gone from Indonesia, and I suspect they are the ones the Lord wants me to remember.

map image: InfoPlease.com