Learning English

The ability to speak English separates the Haves and the Have-Nots among the Balinese.

Farming, fishing, weaving fabrics, construction, and other traditional jobs will pay around $2 for a full day of hard manual labor.  We see our closest Balinese neighbors, who live at the entrance to the small access road to our villa, working far into the evening turning the tall elephant grass (alang-alang) that grows in nearby fields into panels of thatched roof.  We're told that they will earn around $2 for what they can produce in a day.

In the tourist industry, an unskilled bellhop can earn $5 in a few minutes carrying some bags, or a waitress can earn a $2 tip for serving a pizza and a beer.  If you can get a job working with tourists, the work is far easier and the pay far higher.  The key requirement, however, is that you speak English.

Those who are ambitious and in traditional jobs are trying to learn English.  In Amed, when we went to the beach, we were quickly engaged by some of the local fishermen who both wanted to offer us "programs" of snorkeling and diving, and also just wanted a conversation so they could practice their English.

An invisible line on the beach separated the end of the Life in Amed hotel property and the fishing boats of the local fleet.  On one side were villagers who set off fishing at 5 am for what would often be a small catch and a paltry payout.  On the other side were the tourists and those locals who had learned enough English to work at the hotel at reception or in the restaurant.  Some of the local fishermen desperately wanted to be on the other side of that line where they could earn the easy money that came from working with tourists.

The men and women who work as helpers in our villas and other expat villas often have rudimentary English, and in spite of being employed in a tourist related job, are paid a low wage by the villa owners.  (We supplement it with bonuses.)  One of the benefits, though, is the daily opportunity to practice English in the hopes of moving up to a better paying job.
 
Wayan, at Sanctuary, was apologetic about her poor English and eager to learn.  She helped us learn Bahasa Indonesian and we helped her with English.

Here at Villa Jati, Putu is more assertive, always looking forward to a conversation and a chance to try out his English.  He seems not to have learned much English in school. His knowledge is quite haphazard.  He often struggles to communicate the simplest ideas.  It is also often hard to understand his pronunciation.

We're learning that some English words are quite challenging for a Balinese to pronounce.  "Vacuum" is nearly impossible to say as there is no "v" sound in Indonesian.  (Lynn was delighted that, after practicing with him for a while one day, he was finally able to pronounce it.)  Similarly there is no "th" sound in Indonesian so a word like "teeth" is quite difficult to say.  The last consonant is often dropped in Indonesian, so "milk" will come out sounding as "mill".  

Putu is clearly quite sharp.  He has an Indonesian-English dictionary on his phone and is making heavy use of it.  This has the odd result of him tossing advanced vocabulary into a sentence of broken English.  This always catches us off guard; with the combination of his rudimentary English and uncertain pronunciation, we can't quite believe that he is trying to say the word that he seems to be saying.

One day he tried to convey that it would be safe for us to eat at a local restaurant because after being in Bali for a while we now had "invulnerable stomachs."  Just the other day he said he was going to a local temple to be "accommodating" - a word he had pulled off of the dictionary on this phone - as he meant that he was going to help with the preparation for the ceremony.  And in the conversation mentioned below, he said that he is an "autodidact," which very much surprised me when he tossed that word out, but at least in this case it is a cognate of the Indonesian word, "otodidak".

[Update]  A day after writing the post above, I learned that I didn't know as much as I thought.

The family that is working late into the night weaving grass into roofing panels are not our neighbors, but workers brought over from the nearby and poorer island of Lombok.  Our Balinese neighbors are sufficiently well off, as land owners, that they do not have to perform the manual labor themselves.  They can hire the workers from Lombok and pay the workers by the piece to weave the elephant grass that grows on their land.

In talking with Putu, he confirmed that he did not study English in school, which explains his haphazard approach to the language.  But what I just learned is that Putu studied Japanese, and can speak it with much more fluency than English.  Knowing Japanese came in handy for several years at his previous job in an art gallery, at a time when large numbers of Japanese tourists flocked to Bali.  But the number of Japanese tourists has slowed to a trickle, so now Putu is working on English as his fourth language, with Balinese and Bahasa Indonesian being his first two.

This new information I learned after working on the post above reinforces that the judgments and assumptions I make as a newcomer to Bali are often erroneous.  I can see the surface, but the truth often lies beneath the surface.

Posted by Nat, comments/edits by Lynn