IFTF Grant at work in Indonesia!

[Felicity_Banks]

I am incredibly honoured to be one of the recipients of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s first round of microgrants (you can apply for your own microgrants right now but only for the next few days!)

Specifically, I was given a grant to travel to Indonesia around the time of the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival* (the largest writing festival in South-East Asia) and teach English-speaking Indonesians the basics of IF in order to expand the wonderful IF community.

I have been to Indonesia eight times, and my Bahasa Indonesia was once pretty fluent (although it’s rusty). If you played “Bali B & B” in 2023 and suspected there was real-life experience behind the setting, you were absolutely right.

I have also taught several IF workshops in my home town of Canberra, Australia.

Was my grant application a thinly-veiled excuse to get back to Indonesia at last? Yes.

Will the post-comp version of “Bali B & B” be altered by this journey? Also yes.

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Right now I’m in Ubud, Bali. The Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival has just finished and I taught a class yesterday, with more lined up for today, tomorrow, and Saturday. I hope to set up an Indonesian IF writing group so all my students can connect and support one another as well as connecting to the wider community.

It is so delicious to see the surprise and delight as a writer sees their words instantly transformed into a game. After all the kindness and joy Indonesia has given me since my first visit in the 90s, I am warmed from head to toe by this opportunity to give something back. It also means a lot to the Indonesians I meet that people on the other side of the world want to connect with them and welcome them.

I will eventually write a full report, but here is one of my students thanking the IFTF for creating an opportunity to learn something so useful.

*Because of the timing of the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, my project took longer than the usual nine months. The committee has been wonderfully flexible and understanding of the unique challenges of this project.

[severedhand]

This is all amazing!

Can I ask where/how you learned Indonesian? It’s odd, the other day I mentioned learning some in high school in a post in intfic, having not thought of that for years, and then this topic came up.

-Wade

[mulehollandaise]

Woo-hoo! That’s really awesome, thank you so much for the report

[Felicity_Banks]

@severedhand

Can I ask where/how you learned Indonesian?

I started learning in school, age 12, and I visited for the first time when I was about 16, with a Christian group that basically went and did odd jobs at orphanages and suchlike (I remember planting peanut trees and discovering for the first time that my arms could sweat).

Then when I was 18 I stayed with Indonesians for six months in the north end of Bali. They spoke very little English and it was a very intense time. But by the end of six months I was functionally fluent. Immersion is fast but can be incredibly lonely (that was the year 2000 and I didn’t have a phone or an internet connection—I went to an Internet cafe once a week to connect with all my family and friends. The place I stayed had a landline but it definitely wasn’t for me to use, particularly to call overseas!)

And I continued to visit Indonesia fairly frequently until I had kids and became chronically ill (fibromyalgia etc). But my partner and I always planned to take the kids when they were about 10ish. We just couldn’t justify it until now.

[Felicity_Banks]

I’m home safe and still in contact with the students, including running a small contest just for them.

You guys, Bali is SO COOL.