Halloween

I decided to have a Halloween party for my kids at school. I taught about it all week, spent a lot of money on candy and decorations, asked permission to teach about it and to have the party. The day before the party I was told that the party would have to be changed to another day or be canceled. I was a little flustered about changing it. The next day I got a text message from a 3rd party who knows people at my school saying that people are concerned because they think it is a religious holiday (they said halloween sounds like halleluiah?) and that they were nervous that the Muhammadiyah Ulama would be upset if I had this party, and so on. I became veryyy upset about this misunderstanding, mainly because I was never approached about it and only came to know about it from an outside source. This came at the end of a not so great week. Earlier that week, my friend Erica found a massive scorpion in my house, I got a ticket (it was my fault, but very scary---I later found out that what I paid was not a ticket, but korupsi), got a flat tire, and my pipe in my bathroom was somehow leaking into my neighbor's house and flooding it.

Then came the Halloween fiasco. I had a breakdown about this, I do not know why but it was really upsetting to me. So I talked to Nelly from Aminef, and she had Pak Parto, her friend from Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang explain to them that it is not celebrated as a religious holiday, etc. So everything got smoothed over very quickly, and I got to have my party a week later.


It was so fun! The kids bobbed for apples, played pin the tail on the spider, did a candy jar guess,and carved jack-o-lanterns. Cultural misunderstanding has been fixed :)