Bali Blog.

Since the last post, my routines has for sure changed. At this moment I'm sitting at a beach hotel in Seminyak on the southwest coast of the Indonesian island Bali. But this is also a change of routine from the previous four days. Since we -me, a colleague and 13 young students- arrived in Bali on the 12th, we have been living on an organic farm on the northeast part of Bali. The farm was run by one family, who has decided to go completely organic and offer room to visitors who would like to experience the traditional Balinese farming life. The farm was placed between the rice paddy fields in a rural district and only accessible by foot over narrow pathways between the rice fields.
At the farm we were sleeping in small typical stilt cabins, which during daytime was open to all sides, and at night time got closed by rolling bamboo curtains. There were some electric plugs there, but no internet. For the students this was maybe the biggest challenge and even bigger than the one cold shower and the one not flushing toilet, which furthermore also was with out a roof and placed quite central not far from the small houses where we all slept, ate and spend the time when we were not doing hard manual labor in the fields.
To be honest, I was quite nervous myself how I would adapt to this environment, and I was certainly thinking how the students would adapt. Coming from the highly developed and quite sterile world of Hong Kong, where every possible facility to ease human life is available, and where facebook is a more natural mean of communication than the face to face dialog, I for sure had my doubts and was just waiting for the mutiny to start. To this fear came the real hard labor we were doing under a merciless burning sun. We were digging holes in the ground and planting banana trees. 33 was the number. And not that we were only digging the holes, we were as well digging out compost behind the pigs and the cows stables, transporting it in buckets and sacks to fill into the holes around the new banana trees.
But no mutiny came. The students stood the distance and also helped each other keeping up the spirit and a positive atmosphere and work ethic. Best of all, they came to me in the evening and said how much they enjoyed their opportunity to try out this kind of life., and even when the task for the next day was announced -turning a plain grass field into flower beds to growing carrots- there was no angry response or any argument, that this was to hard and they would not do it.

Sorry, but I have the next task on in a few minutes, so I have to stop for now. We have to go to the beach for 3 hours of hard surfing.