Busy social calendar

When it rains it pours. My social calendar has been fully booked the last couple days and it has been wonderful and very enlightening. Yesterday morning I attended a Newbie orientation at the American Women's Association. The AWA, as it is known, is a center that sells publications on Jakarta, sells used English books and other things, organizes various events, has charity related activities, plans trips around Asia, etc. The orientation presented some useful information and most importantly I met a few women. One of the women has 4 boys under 4 (triplets and singleton - can you even imagine?!) and she was helpful in suggesting some child-related things to do around town. I also hope to meet up with her some time for a playdate, as it would be fun for Carter to be around so many boys near his age and I'm sure she is a wealth of knowledge concerning all things BOY. Equally wonderful was meeting a woman who delivered her baby in Singapore just last November. She has already provided me with some contact information on doctors and will also give me some info. on finding short-term apartments, the visa process, etc. I think she will be an amazing resource since she did this so recently. We plan to have lunch next week.

I also met a woman who invited me over for lunch today, along with about 6 other women. I had a very nice time at this lunch, and it provided a great insight into what I think the expat community is going to be like, at least the female side of it. None of these other women work and all of their husbands work for oil companies. I had heard before coming that there are a lot of oil and mining companies here, so it didn't really come as any surprise. What I found surprising though is that none of them really know anything about international development. Many of these women had lived in other countries and yet they didn't seem to know anything about USAID (United States Agency for International Development), international development, etc. It was very eye opening. I'm not used to traveling overseas and having to explain to American expatriates what USAID or int'l development is. In Africa, at least where I've been, that's what most of the expatriates there do and so you automatically fall into the lingo, you know some of the same people, know the companies that do that work, and just basically have a lot to talk about on the topic of work. Here, I was clearly the outsider in that respect and I really had no idea what they were talking about when talking about some aspects of their husbands' work or some of their work benefits, etc. They were very nice women and I enjoyed being in their company, and it was interesting learning about expatriate life that has nothing to do with int'l development, but it was also kind of weird.

The other strange thing about the experience is that not once did they ask me or talk about what they do or did for a living. Not once. I'm so used to that almost always being one of the first topics of conversation. But with this group I guess it is assumed that the wives don't work here, and if they worked before it's not interesting? I don't know... Eventually in a round about way I found out that one of the women is a Montessori certified teacher and is hoping to get some substitute teaching work, and another woman is a physical therapist and is doing what she can by volunteering with physically disabled children. Indonesia, to its discredit I think, has laws against any foreign medical doctors from practicing here. They can consult, but they can't prescribe medicine or work alone. So this woman has this amazing skill that is probably hard to find here, and yet she can't practice it.

I have to admit that I had a preconceived notion of what "oil wives" would be like. Basically, I thought they would be only interested in living it up here and not be interested in the culture, be sort of closed minded, and other basically unfavorable behaviors. But instead I thought these women were very worldly, very down to earth, and very welcoming. I hope I will still think this after getting to know them better.

This evening C, his nanny and I took a walk around the neighborhood. We met another 2.5 year old boy with his nanny on the street and we invited them over to play. They came for a bit and aside from a meltdown on C's part when his new friend started playing with his lawnmower, C enjoyed having a friend his own age. The child lives around the corner and his mom is German and just had another baby boy, and his father is Australian. I just received a call from the mother and C and I are headed to their house tomorrow afternoon. And tomorrow morning we are going to a drop-in preschool to meet up with the family who just recently arrived. Our playdate last week with them fell through so we are trying it again.

So, for the last 2 days, I have had to put the grocery shopping on hold because I've just been too darned busy! What a change!