Reading an old friend's blog brought back a lot of memories. Nine years of my life I spent in LIA. I've got a truckload of memories.
This was how it started: When I was a kid, the future had always looked bleak, with my father being ill and me caught up in growing pains and all. Then my father died. Then I finished high school. I wanted to study English. That's one thing I knew I was good at. But I didn't know what kind of job I could do if I chose English. I didn't want to be a school teacher. My own experiences at school kind of turned me off teaching. My brothers and sister were already working. They would pay my uni tuition. So I thought the sensible and responsible thing would be to choose Accounting as my major, even though I couldn't put two and two together without a calculator (I still can't).
I spent four and a half years studying something that I had no interest in. I actually did okay. I got some A's and B's here and there. I got a job as a finance staff (3 months) an accounting staff (3 days). I hated those jobs. I was a disaster at work. Then for months I was jobless, while my friends from uni had started building careers and making money. I felt like a total loser.
One day I read an ad in the newspaper. Private Tutors Wanted. I gave it a go. I went to the agency's 'office'. It was far, far away in old Jakarta, which I had never been to before. It wasn't much of an office at all. Just an old, dark, dingy place on the second floor of a house. There was an old, roughly made table and several long wooden benches. There was one lonely yellow light bulb hanging from the ceiling. There we were, a bunch of teacher hopefuls, getting a briefing while somebody was cooking and minding the kids downstairs. A few days later I received my first assignment. I got paid around Rp 10.000,- per visit (around Aus $1 and 20 cents). On one hand, the pay made me feel like a loser still. On the other hand, I was very happy to get a job, any job, after months of being unemployed.