Wheels of Steel

They loved the words dude, cool, and chillin’, but it was the angst-laden, metal chord progressions of Linkin Park that finally earned me their respect. With my IPOD and a pair of travel speakers, I seduced the students like a Pied Piper into my English Language Lab. The boldest seemed to be the senior boys who, much like the egregiously egotistical boys in my high school, made the first attempts to breech the doorway; challenging one another’s masculinity with dares to be the first to speak to Teacher. I busied myself with cleaning of the crypt that I had been afforded as a classroom, opening windows and sweeping frighteningly large cobwebs from under the desks. When she approached, I was engrossed in a vigilant search for the eight-legged architect of the webs, who was sure to be displeased with my cohabitation. It was the tiny and brave Hakima, with her thick-rimmed glasses, who crossed the threshold into the unknown, motioning with a dutiful bowing of her tudung-covered head for permission to enter the Lab.
I was the first orang-puteh (white person) these Islamic students had ever encountered, having been sent to private boarding school in the remote jungle of the northeastern province. Isolated in academics, these students lived year round within the walls of their compound, with visits home for only the most important of Islamic holidays. Their exposure to westerners was limited to censored searches over a fractured internet connection on one of the three fossilized computers in the Principal’s office. I had been commissioned by the government to kickstart the English program through a cultural exchange, and it was thus that I found myself riding a motor bike past grazing water buffalo and tiered rice paddies with a baju hiked up around my jeans and a packed lunch of nasi leftovers, struggling to come up with a plan to engage the student body in bilingual discussion of the world's diversity.