Holli Moote is a graduate of Trinity Christian College who did her student teaching at Sekolah Pelita Harapan (SPH; “School of Light and Hope” in English) in Indonesia. She then accepted a job there. Moote teaches at SPH’s college preparatory middle and high school during the day. Most nights she travels to the slum quarter where she teaches basic English to children of the largely Muslim population living there.
CEJ: What are the biggest differences between your birth culture and the culture you’re in now? How much of this is religious and how much is cultural? Do you see more connections between the cultures or more differences?
HM: In terms of religion, the differences are interesting because from the outside they look big, but once you know people and start talking to them, the differences are actually my greatest connection with Indonesian people. Prayer, serving God, doing good to those around you, and studying holy books are all things people can understand and connect to. Now that I live here, I read conservative “Christian” articles and hear exactly what would come out of the mouth of a Muslim (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse). Ideas about modesty, purity, and rule-following seem similar across Christianity and Islam. The goal for me as a Christian is to show that the relationship involved in Christianity far exceeds any religious rules that may make it seem the same as any other religion.
CEJ: You teach music all day at a Christian school in Indonesia, and some nights you journey to an impoverished area to teach English to children and sometimes to their parents. What is that teaching like?
HM: I teach in three areas of a place called Ciheuleut. I have one class where kids come when they want or when their parents let them or when they’re not out begging or holding umbrellas for money. That class constantly feels like we are at the beginner stage. I have three or four girls who come regularly, and I do a bit more with them, but they certainly haven’t progressed like they could if the others were more consistent. With that class my end goal is not so much that they learn good English, but that they have someone consistently encourage them to attend school and to study, and maybe that will make a difference for one of them.
I have another class that begins the year eager and tends to shrink in attendance as we go, surging back at Christmastime and then shrinking again. They have progressed further than the first class I mentioned, but each time we restart, we have to go back and review heavily.
The third class attends consistently, and it really shows. Some of those kids can have a short conversation with me about school and what they have been doing that week. They challenge me because I have to keep thinking about their next step and which topics and vocabulary to teach.
CEJ: How long do class sessions run? What do you do during them?
HM: A typical class session can run from forty-five minutes to nearly two hours, depending on student interest (I basically teach as long as they want).
Each one starts with our two welcome songs “Hello, hello, what’s your name?” (with children taking turns coming to the front so we can sing their names) and “Hello, hello, hello, how are you?” (with verses featuring answers like happy, sad, tired, hot, and thinking). We sing them each class. With a beginning class, I will leave it at that or perhaps ask the older kids the same questions in spoken format afterward to see how they do. With a middle class, I’ll go around the circle and ask each student. Over the year they’ll gradually start to go from person-to-person asking one another. My advanced class can go from person-to-person asking these and other questions they’ve learned.
Then we sing other songs they know (some with visual cues), like the ABCs, “1-2-3-4-5-jump!,” a color song, “I like to eat, eat, eat (apple, banana, pineapple),” and songs about transportation, days of the week, and months of the year. A beginner class sings fewer songs, usually focusing on a topic each class, like colors, fruits, or body parts. The advanced class will sing them all and then use the things we sang about to practice conversation.
Next I read them a book or practice flash cards with them. They like to listen to the book and supply me with the Indonesian and Sundanese words for whatever is in the book (animals or shapes, for example).
After that we have coloring time (I found awesome half-size clipboards in Singapore, and the students use those as their hard surfaces). I make the coloring pages each time. We go through the alphabet, one letter a week. Once a group has done that, we move onto topical pages (like fruits or the body). The advanced class does a word search or color-by-number.
If they still want to hang around after that, I usually bring along a vocabulary word-matching game, BINGO boards, or a puzzle we can do.
CEJ: How do you understand your calling from God? Are you called to be a music teacher? A teacher in Indonesia? A teacher in both the suburbs and the slums?
HM: My whole life I’ve wanted to work with kids, and my love of music naturally complements that, so I hope to spend many years of my life teaching music. In terms of working in the slum, I think that’s just a natural Christian response to the needs around me. I believe that no matter who we are and no matter where we live, God calls us to the poor and those in need. I hope that no matter where I am, whether in Chicago or in Bogor, I continue to live in Christ’s love for the “least of these.”
That being said. On the brink of my twenty-fifth birthday, despite four years living independently overseas, I still feel very young. So, I hesitate to make big statements about my whole life calling because I am still discovering parts of who I am and who God is calling me to be every day. But, one thing I am most sure of is that God calls me to an abundant life; not abundant in possessions or power (I am not too concerned with either at this point), but abundant in the joy God gives from meeting people, living among them, and loving them.
CEJ: During the time you’ve taught in the slum, were there times you wanted to quit? When were those times? Why didn’t you quit?
HM: Usually in the dead of night, prompted by a leaking roof, 85,000 mosquito bites in the last hour, loud music from next door, a cockroach flying over my head, a crying baby, all four mosques doing their four a.m. call to prayer. Fortunately these things tend to occur when I’m cranky and sleep-deprived, and they dissipate once I’m up and on my early morning walk to the bus the next day.
The more serious ones have sprung from times I’ve felt like what I’m doing is not actually making a difference and may never be. The hardest was when the daughter of the people who let me use their house (room) for class asked me about prayer and I answered honestly. The next week they wouldn’t let me in, and no kids showed up for class. It took over a month to get a regular group back together. It was discouraging to say the least. Ultimately they came back, and I think that it was, potentially, a blessing. Now I have class outside, where the mothers can gather around and listen during the lesson, and I can chat with them while the kids work on their worksheets at the end. I tend to feel intimidated talking with students’ mothers in general (because of culture, language, and season of life), and this forces me to get out of my comfort zone and have conversations.
People have also planted seeds of doubt, asking if I really think anything will ever happen in such an intensely Muslim people group, especially since years have already gone by with minimal results. And sometimes comments like that can get in my head, whether or not the person who made them has ever traveled to the Kampung or been to a class. I don’t know that I can say whether I’ll be able to ward these off for good, but whenever I start to doubt, I reevaluate and think about why I’m there and what I’m doing. When I stop and think about it, it helps.
I don’t think I’m under a grand illusion that I am going to single-handedly convert the entire Sundanese tribe through weekly English classes in a slum. But I will be glad if I can make even a small difference for one family or one kid. If a little girl goes to school two years longer than her mother did because she had someone encouraging her, then maybe her daughter can go two years longer than she did, and maybe her granddaughter will be able to get a job and move out, or get a job and come back to make a bigger difference in the Kampung than I ever could have as an outsider.
Maybe what essentially keeps me coming back is focusing on small goals and small victories and letting God handle the big worries. And I’m constantly reminded that God is right there with me; when I can feel myself getting discouraged, God will often send a child or a parent to say something encouraging, give me a tiny gift to show appreciation, invite me over to meet their daughter’s or niece’s new baby, or even just chat with me about weekly goings-on when I’m not in class. Things like that make me feel welcomed and loved enough to power through discouragement and keep going.
