A NEW LIFE

It’s been a week that  I have been staying here in Pangkalanbun, Central Kalimantan. It’s a small city compared to Surabaya, where I used to live. It is a whole lot different  experience for me who almost never been stayed out from Surabaya.

Quite whole of my life, I stayed in Surabaya. I knew the weather, the food, the crazy traffic, the road, the public transportation, the malls, the environment, even the flood! I took pride of being a member of Surabaya. I loved my job, my friends, and my family. I loved the traffic there...! Kindda miss the traffic though hehehe... Yet, in this new place, I have to restart everything from zero.

Living in a new place, meeting new people, adapting with culture and habits here are really challenging.  I really have to get out of my comfort zone. I have to develop a new habit of taking care of a shop which I never tried before. I have to memorize the prices and the building materials. I must admit, I am a bad shopkeeper. I cannot even differentiate the 5 inch nails to 12 inch nails or which nails for the roof and the board. I do not know what is the tape for the pipes.  Sometimes.. the shoppers had helped me finding the things they needed themselves. Oh well.. whole of my life, I only know how to teach English, so I really do not know the stuff here. I have to learn whole lots things here.

Being a week here, I also find out that the electricity and water can be off daily, which rarely happened in Surabaya. So, I must prepare all the times. I must prepare the emergency lamps and fill in the water tank to full every morning or else.. no water for whole day. The second day here, the water was off whole day and no water in the water tank, as a result... I had to wait the water ran again at 10 P.M. just for taking a bath - really an experience for a homey girl like me.

But Pangkalanbun has a great side too. It has a great potential as a city and still very green. The people are nice too. Well, so far.. I haven’t encountered the bad ones hahaha.. so yea.. they are nice. I love taking a walk in the evening especially in my father-in-law’s house in Kampung Raja Sebrang. It’s  lovely long houses kampoeng on the riverside. The sky is so beautiful and it’s very peaceful.

So far, I still have wide opened eyes of wonder since everything is so different than the things in Surabaya. I learn to give thanks for very simple things that I take it for granted in Surabaya, for example the supply of water and electricity. Here, having water to run all the time is a blessing hehe...

Anyway, challenge can bring you down or can bring you up. It depends on you. As the pressure comes, there’s also a change to bounce up too. The higher the pressure, the higher the chance to bounce up too. As an analogy, let’s use the basketball. When the basketball has got a low pressure, it only bounces a little, yet when the basketball has got a high pressure, the basketball bounces higher. The pressure can bury us down, or can get us out of the box and be the better us. Life is about chances and how to use each opportunity to bring us closer to God and glorify his Name.

Look up...  seek the silver lines in everything.