GeoTagged, [S6.29119, W106.88064]
March 12, 2012
I feel sick listening to the NPR Foreign Dispatch News. It makes me realize how isolated I am from the world. The Indonesian news I watch almost exclusively covers news in Indonesia. The last international news I saw was about conflict in Pakistan and it was very brief. Sometimes I feel like I live in such a remote place, but I live only an hour away from the gargantuan city of Jakarta! Sometimes I flip through the 12 channels that my family has, and even though about half the channels are "news" channels, there will be no news coverage. Just now I tried to find some news and the only news I could find was a story about how this Indonesian vegetable could be made into a music instrument... Not that I don't find that cool and interesting, but after listening to my news pod-casts from the end of February, beginning of March, well... I know that the world isn't exactly lacking on news stories. I'm actually rather surprised that news stations here don't cover more stories about Syria--obviously there are a lot of important events going on there...devastating events! But I wouldn't be surprised if this lack of news coverage is from a lack of dispatched journalists, you can't get the scoop on a story if you don't have people on the scene. And even though theses channels seem to be big corporations, well, compared to American news corporations, I don't think they are that big. Maybe even rather small. So, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lack of international news coverage because there's a lack of resources to get out and get those international stories. Indonesians are pretty linguistically oriented--as far as most of them speak two languages fluently (their local, native language and then bahasa indonesia)--but as far as international languages they are not exactly known for being proteges (almost everyone that I've met exclaims that they've been learning English since kindergarten or elementary school, but they still can't hold even a very basic conversation...actually, embarrassingly enough, I've yet to meet an English TEACHER that can carry on a conversation beyond "how are you today?".... After that it's an effort on my part to try and understand their English). My point being that I can see international language capability tying into the international news complex.
I finally took a picture of my fish pond--it's not a great one though. But you can see the bridge plank and a fish! I like to include pictures with my blogposts, even if it's a digression.
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