INDONESIAN STUDENTS DISCUSS HARD WORK BACK HOME DURING LONGVIEW VISIT

For Favrhan Widyahartono, breakfasts of eggs and toast are one of the things that stand out about the United States. Back home in Indonesia, rice is the typical morning meal, the 15-year-old explained.Widyahartono and 11 other high school students from Indonesia have become used to all-American breakfasts during the past two weeks as they visited North Carolina and Los Angeles. They’re spending six days in the Longview-Kelso area this week under an exchange with theFriendship Force of Lower Columbia.That organization has hosted adults from foreign countries here and sent local adults abroad, but it’s the first time a group of foreign students has traveled here under the Friendship Force, said organizer Judi Smith.“We try to show them the different America,” said the Indonesians’ teacher, Desi Kurniawati. “It’s not the one they watch on movies. The people are friendly and very warm.”“I loved Los Angeles. It’s cool,” said Vedy Sahetapy, 15. She was impressed by the Columbia River, too. “We saw many waterfalls there,” she said.The students performed dances from different regions of their vast country of 17,000 islands at the Lower Columbia College Student Center on Monday. One dance was from Java, another from West Papua and a third from Borneo and Kalimantan.Back home, the students, who are 15 or 16 years old, don’t have much time for dance.They attend the SMAN8 high school in the capital, Jakarta, which focuses on science and technology. Classes go from 6:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., and many students take extra academic subjects after that.Kurniawati boasted that the school, one of the 116 public schools in Jakarta, is one of the best in the country. “We just won a gold medal in geography, a silver medal in astronomy and a silver medal in chemistry,” she said. The school’s debate team is going to a competition in Germany.Kurniawati said teachers allow students to use smartphones in class for research because the school’s Internet doesn’t provide connections as well.“We have been learning English since we were in Kindergarten, so we speak almost fluently in English,” Sahetapy said. She has also taken Mandarin Chinese for eight years and some German.Indonesia’s hundreds of languages make for communication challenges at home. Alfatah Winata, 16, said his parents are from different parts of Java with different languages. “I can understand what they are talking about but I can’t reply,” he said. They can all speak the official national language, Indonesian.Kurniawati said many of the school’s students go abroad for college — to Europe, Singapore or the United States.Winata takes German twice a week after school, and plays soccer on Saturdays only. He hopes to study in Germany after graduating from high school.“I’m planning to go to college to the London Institute of Technology” to study economics, Widyahartono said.Sixteen-year-old Aura Nabil has no lack of ambition for what she wants to do after high school.“I want to continue to Harvard,” she said. “I will take medicine. I want to be a heart specialist.”