To live far away from my parents and family, makes friendships I make with people here more precious. Lucky me, some of them feel very much like my own family, granted, they do take awhile to find. These connections are precious, and make my home-away-from-home living fun. Some of the people from the Indonesian community in Canberra formed AILSA (Australia Indonesia Language School Association), to help our kids who live here to learn Indonesian language and its cultures. We want our kids to understand and be able to converse in Indonesian, even when they have never lived in Indonesia. (Almost) Like a family, we meet once a week and teach our children their mother’s mother tongue, as well as other interesting Indonesian things.It’s always proven challenging for children in our ‘situation’, because local language (in this case English) always dominates. It helps that everyone is familiar and friendly, most of the kids even grew up together, sort of. In a relaxed and comfortable setting, learning language has never been easier.

This event was an AILSA outing, before AILSA is going through a long winter (maybe even summer) hibernation. We went to Corin Forest to play tobogan in the snow, and have some wintery picnic right after. Everyone had tremendous fun.

I hope AILSA classes can resume next year with better, greater and more fun program. [Yes, this is a very non-cryptic coded message for some of you, you know who you are! 😉 ]