sekolah • like it's a birthday

Hullo people!

Hereby I proudly declare that School Final Examination is officially done! And I might fucked them royally. Kinda. I'm sure I failed Economics, badly, along with Math. So yeah, fingers crossed that they didn't turned out being that bad.

 Amen.

Anyways, one of the last thing to do in the series of SFE is doing a day social work in an assigned place, and S3 (my class) got Melati Kasih, a shelter for children to learn things, like crafts or something. Twas a lot of fun! I'm infatuated with their pearl of laughter and adorable smiles.

Yes, I have soft spot for nice, well-behaved kids.

No, there's no one having a birthday that day. But it looks like it, yeah? Especially with that happy birthday balloons, haha! Colorful is happy place, even though the balloons refused to stick in place for more than five minutes. (-__-)

A LOT OF CHILDREN.

It was crowded, like, realllyyy crowded. Especially when we are doing games.

And there's me teaching English. My team can't differ between mother and father in the beginning, but we finally aced that and won the game. Fuck Yeah Team 5!

It was a really tiring day, with a lot of shouting instruction and stuff. In the end of the session, after the kids all went home, Mrs. Darti, the caretaker of the shelter, have us gathered, and there's a small study session about Wayang.

SHRIEK. It's one of my favorite Indonesian crafts!

There isn't a lot of my friends excited about this thing. But I love it anyway!

He's a Dalang (wayang's puppet master), and he has 170 items of wayang, and his teacher is a great wayang maestro.

There's this story he told about wayang that left my friend a little freaked out. So, he learned about wayang in Solo (there are different wayangs in different areas, like Mangkunegaran, Pakualaman, and so on?) and he told us that there's a special wayang in Keraton Solo that's made from human skin (wayang's usually made from buffalo's skin) and that wayang has a curse. If you touched it, you'll die.

Thus, she freaked out.

Another thing is, wayang is realllyyy expensive. And that day, I fucking hold a fucking two million rupiahs Gunungan (a type of wayang used as background in the show) and damn that thing is SO COOL.

They have different pictures on each side.

I WANT ONEEE ;;_____;;

Sooo that's all for now. The only obstacle left is National Final Examination, which will be held on April 15-18. After that, a long day offs awaits! So excited for that already, whoop!

Dag!

fotonya • juli

And the sky was a-flare,
when he came up for air,

in his homemade, fan-blade,

one-man submarine ride.

( Walt Grace Submarine Test, January 1967 • John Mayer)

(i'm pretty sure her crop tee was from forever 21; and obviously the pair of shoes is converse; shorts? zilch. got no idea.)

Endless Summer.

Model: Eva Pastora

Photographer: F. Theodora

curhatnya • populorum progressio

Hullo, guys.

 

Today I'm gonna share to you a little habit of mine: I always ate something to the very last bit of it.

Siriusly.

You might see this as an odd thing, but really—seeing leftovers in restaurants, or bits of food abandoned and thrown away in the streets—they broke my heart a little bit. You might say that I'm a greedy person or a cheapskate for eating and savoring it to the very last drop, but for me, it’s odd to left your food when it’s not done eaten.

But, Dhik, I’m full, what should I do?

Well, my parents taught me to measure how much I can eat first, before blindingly taking everything to my heart’s desire. That mindset is ingrained in my head since I was a kid. Coming from the in-betweens—the not really wealthy but not poor too?—my family always told me to take it ‘secukupnya’ (English: fairly—a fair amount) so it fits my stomach’s need. Back in the day, they said something that intrigued me:

“The rice will cry if we do not eat them.”

It sounds kinda odd, isn’t it? Rice have no feelings, let alone tear glands.

Many kids in Indonesia are probably taught the same way—at least in my generation, some of we did. Because I generally hate making someone sad, I always tried to eat until my plate is really clean, without any trace of rice—I ate it until the last grain! My friends sometimes laugh at my almost OCD way of eating.

Growing up, I watch the telly, and then see the truths for myself with my very own eyes—I saw the less fortunate people struggling for shred of better life, I saw how steadfast they take it—and then I realized that what I’ve been taught as a kid is true, in it’s quirky way.

Tears dropped, about foods.

According to United Nations Environment Programme’s website, one in every seven people go to bed hungry, and more than 20.000 people die of hunger everyday, worldwide.

THAT’S A LOT OF PEOPLE.

I have 28 classmates at school—imagine them as a crude sample, then, every night four of them go to bed hungry. There are a lot of people all around the world—like, A LOT. Many of them is left hungry, waiting to succumb to malnutrition or something else because they lack of food. Because some irresponsible people wasted tonnes of food that probably can feed 900 million hungry people in the world.

It’s not the rice, or the other form of food, that cry, it’s the people that longing for them that dropped tears.

And did you know that wasted food contributes their own share in global warming? People condone industrial wastes for destroying the environment, but leftovers that rotting in landfills emits methane—one of the most dangerous GHG the Earth faces.

Eat smartly might take baby steps to do—with people’s habit and different lifestyles we lived, but every scrap of food we waste, someone in the other side of the world might be dying to have that. So count your blessings and share them.

Eat. Wisely.

Toodles!

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Title's translation: The Development of People; an encyclical written by Pope Paul VI.