...the journey back home

Going out of my “home” was like stepping out of a big picture of my home and looking back into it. Staring into the picture for quite sometime, even though only from one angle, Australian angle, part of it looks ugly and another part looks even much more beautiful when I look it from here.

One and a half year is indeed a very short episode of my life, and I have to leave it. Part of me wants to stay a little longer because I really want to travel somewhere else outside this state and learn some other things, but another part of me misses home so badly until I keep calling home telling my mother that I’ll be home soon.

I’m here in Australia when quite many hard tensions occur, and I just once wondered why on earth I have to be here, feeling scared and a little bit insecure. Then I went out… trying to figure out what life looks like in my closest neighbour’s home. My God… it is awesome!! (copying the words they often said), people saying sorry when they do something bad to other people even if it is ‘not so significant’, students study hard day and night. Fathers carry their kids on their shoulders and play in the parks. And if I see this my heart just say a little prayer, I wish I can see this in my home country.

“Where are you from ?” asked a taxi driver, “I’m from Indonesia” I answered, “wow I’ve been there….it’s beautiful, but recently a lot of bad things happened hey, was there any of your relatives died in the Tsunami?”, “luckily no, because my families live in the eastern part of the country. From this short conversation a lot of questions occur in my head, what is in his mind about Indonesia? And then I went to an art center to see Rendra reciting his poets, a lot of Australian came to see him. Well here they are, they are Australian who see things differently, humanity is here, exists, right in front of you, where people look at you not because of your skin or the faith in your heart but because there is one thing in human beings that happens to be born in every skin color and every body shape, a universal value that you can find everywhere in the world.

Even though people say Australians drink till they get crazy, but I feel save here, I often had to stay until midnight to work on my assignment at the computer lab, and walked home on my own, holding my metal keychain (just in case someone attack me, keychain is bad enough to hurt someone’s face hahaha), but things that I’m afraid of have never happened to me, thank God.

I’ve learnt a lot, learn to accept and to be accepted, learn to be different and to see and appreciate different things, to understand the meaning of right and wrong from different values and different point of view. Learn to study hard, to stand on my own, to make my own decision, learn to have a strong determination to do the things that I believe (is it possible?). I’ve made friends with people from many different countries. I’m looking forward to see the next chapter of my life, indeed like an ancient Aboriginal proverb “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home." Maybe the meaning of ‘home’ in this sense is deeper than a building or a place where we were born or a place where our parents reside. And learning to grow up might even have a deeper meaning. So I do not have to be afraid to go home, going back to ‘reality’ as students often said. And indeed I’m not afraid. So never afraid to leave home and never afraid to go back home.

“I want to make a difference, a worthwhile difference”
Still learning to grow up
Me