Indonesia

Japan had still not arrived, we had to go back to borrowing the old jeep oto perang.

Our house had four bedrooms. The children all slept together in one, we slept in the main bedroom, which had a door to the bathroom. The third was our spare bedroom, and the fourth became my office. This also had an external door. A large lounge-dining room extended through the width of the house. We divided it with a curtain made of Timor cloth. Next to the office was the gudang or store room, then came the servants room and the kitchen, all with doors opening to the court yard. The servants' toilet was on the opposite side of the kitchen, next to ours and the bathroom, which formed the third wing of the court yard. This made an ideal outdoors sitting place, so we had it all concreted and sat there in the cool of the evenings, like at Peter's house. While the builders were there, we also had the servants' toilet renovated. I considered the hole in the ground quite unhygienic and unacceptable. The new basin was an Asian squat toilet, which had a proper air seal.

While we were sitting outside one evening, someone entered our bedroom window and stole some personal items. This was reason enough to fix some steel bars on all windows. With these we were able to leave the shutters open all night to let the cooler night air in.

In our new house at Oeba we needed two more helpers, apart from Lisa. One to live in with Lisa and to do all indoor jobs, and another just to do our daily washing. Rachel would come after breakfast and leave again after lunch, when all the washing was dry and ironed. Lunch was included for her, which meant a great deal, as most money spent had to go on food. We paid our staff a little more than the going rate in Kupang, which was still only a small amount compared to our salary. It was quite common also in Indonesian households to have helpers, so this was not just a privilege for foreigners. We made it a point, however, to treat them kindly and give them their regular day off at weekends. When we had visitors for dinner, we tried not to make it too late for them.

Alison would usually cook on Sundays and I did the washing up, much to our students' surprise. An Indonesian male would normally never be seen in a kitchen. But they chipped in with the dishes, and I hope we set an example for them to follow.

During the week Alison's day varied in the mornings, but afternoons were always filled with the boys' school work. They attended the local school in the mornings, starting at 7 am. As all subjects were taught only in Indonesian, they needed to do their Australian correspondence courses in the afternoons. Alison supervised all three boys in their different grades, which can't have been easy. In the mornings she would play tennis twice a week between 6 and 7 am, before it got too hot. Twice a week she also taught English conversation at the University. The menue for the day had to be discussed with Lisa, the cook, the daily purchases checked, some visiting was done, as well as shopping. Ready-made clothes

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