The Package

Along with a little Christmas decorating, I am playing catch-up on the blog this weekend! Here is a post that should have been written back in early November. 

It took almost 11 months and many friends but a Christmas package sent by my sister, Kara, in December 2013 has finally arrived! Even more amazing it was unopened and undamaged (minus a little rat nibble)!! 

It was late one afternoon in October that I started getting several weird text messages and notes on Facebook. It took me awhile to sort it out but apparently a package had arrived at the house where I had lived in Salatiga during language study and it was addressed to me. Now I had moved out of that house back in March but the people who had moved into it were also expats and knew the fun a package from home can bring, so they had put a message on a Facebook group for all expats living in Salatiga asking if anyone knew who Callie Yates was and how they could get in touch with me. Several of the people in that group are my friends and so they all started contacting me. 

There is a unique system here in Indonesia that I call the titip system. Basically, if you have something you want to send somewhere and you know someone going to that place (even if they don't the person you want to send that something to) you can titip it with them. This works even if it has to use several connections to get somewhere. For example, we sometimes have things delivered to a friend of ours who owns a Christian bookstore in the city five hours away. He will titip it with someone to the home of the parents of our surgeon in the city of Singkawang (a town an hour away from the hospital). The surgeon's parents will then titip the package with the school bus driver who takes the kids from our village into the school in town 6 days a week. The school bus driver then leaves it with the guard post at the front gate of the hospital who calls you (or flags you down as you walk past) and lets you know you have titipan to pick-up. The crazy thing is that the said item almost always gets to where it needs to! 

So using the titip system my package was sent with a friend who is from Pontianak but goes to university in Salatiga when she came home for a break. From there it was given to friends of hers who are also friends of mine and the next time I was in Pontianak they delivered it to me. So 11 months later here it is... 

The presents inside are still wrapped, so I think I will just leave them wrapped and open them this Christmas :)