ETA Alex Bue traveled one hour by car with university students from the local American Corner – a kind of cultural space created by the United States government to educate Indonesians about America – to the beach town of Pariaman to adjudicate a spelling bee at a small dusty high school.

The practical need for a judge was nonexistent, with Alex performing a function more correctly and quickly done by Google. The worst result of his participation was botching the final word – “Marshmallow” – judging it to be spelled with an “e” not “a”, and thereby incorrectly rewarding the winner, who was told to sit down after a brief celebration.

But Alex and the students had fun. The main event, it seemed to Alex afterward, was the opportunity for him to be prodded at in Bahasa Minang, the provincial language, by dozens of boys at once. This by now is a frequent occurrence for Alex and has become a kind of ritual: male students in Padang tend to know less English than their female counterparts; they are relentlessly sardonic; but after speaking a bit of the vernacular, Alex develops a rapport with the boys and they become aggressively curious about the US and whether it, too, has rice (in the past, Alex has been told he doesn’t need to eat but should answer more questions). On the eve of his departure from Indonesia as an amateur teacher-ambassador-Fulbrighter, it is ironically these encounters, communicated with a minimum of language and almost no English, concerned with America but in places impossibly distant from it, that seem the most important.

Alex Bue is currently teaching at SMAN 11 Padang, West Sumatra