My first trip to Asia has been very interesting! Within 3 weeks I am now having a child and getting married to an Indonesian girl.
Manado, Indonesia
Oh My Goodness !!
A few months ago I left the gritty atmosphere of West Yorkshire and found myself in blissful Bali, Indonesia.
Long story short, after only three weeks in Bali, my first time in Asia, I had a girlfriend and after only three dates we slept together, and she got pregnant.
Heptonstall Village, visible from my home town of Mytholmroyd
My girlfriend is now my fiancee because if we have a child and we are not married it will bring about some kind of bad ju-ju voodoo for her family, firstly because she is from a Christian family and essentially does hold Christian values, and secondly because she is from a village in Minahasa which is half way up a mountain in the middle of a jungle where they appear to also hold beliefs more in line with animism .
Traditional Dance of Minahasa
I'm not going to go into details regarding why my girlfreind, who is named Nindy, fell pregnant so soon after we met, but let me just say that despite Nindy speaking rather good English, there was a miscommunication.
We didnt talk much about the pregnancy for the first six weeks although we couldnt escape it, I thought about running from the situation, Nindy reluctantly mentioned abortion once, my worries about how I can finance having a baby in Indonesia and her concerns about how her family would react to finding out she was pregnant along with her own worries about the future brought a huge amount of stress, but we have decided to allow nature to take it's course.
First Scan of Nindy's Tummy, around 7 weeks pregnant
I did speak with other people about my situation and unfortunately my head was mostly filled with stories of Western men meeting Indonesian women and getting conned into supporting them through pregnancy when the baby was actually someone else's or all kinds of other wonderful tales like that, this didn't help much.
Nindy returned home to visit her parents six weeks into the relationship and when she came back to Bali the pressure had mounted, Nindy quit her job because she was generally nauseous and throwing up, her family knew she was pregnant, and now it was up to me to get on a plane and visit them with Nindy and start planning a wedding ASAP.
Nindy, her friends Amanda and Pamela, and her sister Melissa
Nindy, Myself, and Billy (Nindy's little bro)
Nindy and I went to visit last week, I spent three days with her and her family, it was close to being the most stressful time of my life what with expectations on me about wedding and my finances, the average wage in the UK is not far off ten times more than the average wage in Manado, the city which neighbors Minahasa, so the general assumption there is that Westerners or even foreigners in general are rich, the assumption is probably made worse by folk splashing the cash from their holiday savings while visiting Indonesia.
Despite the heavy emotions, stress and bad moods I experienced, I met a wholly genuine, hilarious and wonderful family of whom I will soon be a part. I saw a whole new depth and dimension to Nindy while staying with her family, I was happy to see that she could relax a little in her own environment and talk of superstitions and the scary spirits that want to take unborn children, or how I'm not to go hunting or eat any snake while she is pregnant.
So as it stands, I'm still full of fears but I'm facing them one at a time to the best of my ability and intend to maintain my integrity. It's a struggle at the moment finding the cash to get by and I'm going to smash out the posts on steemit and pray that I can bring in some income. I'm not a exactly a religious person myself, but beyond the difficulties I appear to be facing at the moment I have a tremendous amount of faith.
I guess I will keep you posted on the wedding.