Smatterings of vocabulary of the week

‘g’ is for galak, gaptek, gubrak

“She’s so galak,” my colleague said, as we listened to one of the grade 1 teachers scolding her students.  Galak means ‘fierce.’   

Hearing her say that reminded me of how I mixed up galak with another word on the way to school yesterday morning. We were talking about technology and I mentioned how I was worried about being technologically inept once I return to the US.  The term for “technologically inept” here is gaptek but instead I said, “Yeah, I’m so…galak” to which you can imagine there were some snickers from my fellow carpoolers at my foible.  Definitely a gubrak moment, which I have used with a hashtag in my tweets before (when I used to tweet more frequently, haha).  

Gubrak basically means the sound that a wicker chair makes when someone falls out of it and tries to regain their balance.  It has the sentiment of awkward and oops and hitting a wall mixed together (I’m sure I’m missing some things but it’s kind of hard to convey it in English).

Some more alliteration.  ‘G’ is for goals and some of mine are to outgrow being gaptek and figure out how to update my blog skills, learn Photoshop, and eventually have a teaching blog someday.  But I will probably start another blog on going back to school and being a grad student + adjusting back to life in the States after living overseas.  Let’s see.

Paskah | on Easter

Being a Christian school (at least nominally), we have been talking to the kids about Easter this week, in light of its passing last Sunday.  We sang a song in Character Building (CB) which brought about some more inspiration for this post. 

I was sitting between two students today who come from families who identify themselves as “Buddhist” on their KTP (identification card).  The one on my left has kept asking, “What is Easter?  I don’t know about Easter,” even though we have been talking about it for a while.  We sang a song called “Yesus, Sahabat Ku.”  I actually didn’t know the meaning of sahabat and didn’t ask about it until after CB was over.  I tried asking the two boys sitting on my left and right, but they said that they didn’t know.  It’s funny to think that my kids don’t actually speak Bahasa Indonesia in their homes.  

Nikki, who was sitting on my left, said, “What is Tuhan?” which is the word for ‘God.’  I explained that to him, and he said, “Oh, I know Tuhan.”  After that, I asked one of the K2 teachers what sahabat meant and she told me, “best friend.  Nikki asked what “reff” meant below, and it means “chorus” so I decided to post the lyrics here: 

Yesus sahabat ku 

Jesus, my best friend

Kau mati bagi ku

You died for me
How great is your love
My best friend and my Lord

Reff.

Sampai ku besar nanti 

Until I grow older

Ku kan ingat dikau

Yesus sahabat dan Tuhan ku 

Jesus, my best friend and my Lord

About a month ago, I actually had a pretty deep conversation with the student on my right, Nathan, while I was talking about the word “die” for long /ie/ in Phonics class.  I was asking my students what happens to us after we die.  And Nathan said that we go to heaven, if we do enough good things.  I told him that actually, there’s never enough that we could do to win our way into heaven, and that we must place our faith in Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life and paid the price for our sins - death - so that we could have eternal life.  Nathan sat and thought about it for a while, and said, “I’m Buddha [I’m Buddhist], we just need to do a lot of good things to go to heaven.”  But the same Nathan when I asked him today said that he thought that Jesus was his best friend, and he said “yes.”  

Lastly, the last of the review questions at CB today was, “Why did Jesus die?” and Nikki and Nathan raised their hands and waved them wildly.  When they weren’t picked to answer the question, Nathan said sadly (because he wanted to answer the question so badly), “Because he wanted to obey his Father” and Nikki said, “Yeah, that was my answer too.”  While it is true that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of mankind, it’s so easy to make the cross about us only.  I was amazed to hear their understanding of Jesus’ obedience to His Father’s will, to stick to God’s plan of redeeming creation to Himself for His glory.  I hope that Nikki and Nathan can understand someday just how much God loves them.