A FAREWELL PARTY FOR JOSE ALFAREZ

Jose Alfarez is an American guy. He is an Indian from Arizona.  Although his wife is an Indonesian woman, he can not speak Indonesian language. 

He has been guiding us, the lecturers of Biology Department of Mathematics and Natural Science Faculty of Yogyakarta State University, in English speaking.  He has been successfully making us confident to practice speaking in English. 

We are having an english class every Friday morning. He always makes the class fun, and makes us enjoy and relax to participate. He gives us lesson in reading, listening,  speaking, writing, conversation and grammar. He also let us know how to give a good presentation. 

His teaching method is very fun. The learning by playing method makes us happy to practice english. Sometime he gave a topic to discuss by playing a role game. On another day we held a fun cooking in the class, just a simple cooking, i.e. making American beef burger. By cooking the class could learn new vocabularies about food and cooking process.

 

This programme has been running for more than a year. We got a lot of  progress because of this program, especially  in courage to speak English.  In addition, we became more familiar with native speaker, especially with the American english. That was why when we knew that the class would be over soon, we felt so sad.  Therefore, we planned a farewell party to thank to Jose, which would be conducted  at the last meeting. I proposed a potluck party to the class, because I was impressed when about a year ago my flatmates in Bristol, UK conducted a potluck farewell party for me when I was going to come home to Indonesia. Fortunately, all my classmates agreed with me.

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This was the last day of the class. It was really hard for us to loose the weekly togetherness moments. After finishing the lesson, we held a farewell party to say goodbye to Jose.  As we planned at the previous meeting, I brought some “tahu bakso”, a kind of fried tofu filled with meatball, Ms Popi brought some cups of fruit juice, Ms Mariyam brought a plastic tube of cashew nuts, Ms Tutiek Rahayu brought some “arem-arem” (a kind of food that made from rice filled with chopped vegetables and chicken and wrapped with banana leaf), and Ms Budiwati brought Salak and some slices of Bali orange. Beyond our expectations, Jose brought some traditional foods.  He had asked his servant to buy them at the traditional market. It made us surprised. Thanks to Jose and his wife for this.

Before eating together, Jose gave a talk about his impression of us and the class.  He said that we all were getting better in english than the first time he met us.  He really enjoyed teaching us.  He also advised us not to be shy to practice speaking english to anybody and anywhere. “Keep practicing english,” he said.  I, as a representative of the students, replied that we all were very grateful to him for his kindness and patience to teach us with a fun method.

We hope to always be in touch. Who knows one day we can visit USA and meet Jose there. Who knows...

Yogyakarta, June 1^st 2012,

Dedicated to Jose Alvarez

(Siti Mariyam, Popi, Budiwati, Tutiek, and me)