It's a hot day in July. The author finds herself in a university classroom in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, listening as an Achenese elementary school teacher narrates a children's story. As the teacher breaks into song in the middle of the story, the 20 other teachers in the classroom join in. The author is awed by their talents and thinks about how lucky she feels to be able to experience this. This paper is an author's account of trying to make some sense of two intense weeks she spent in the capital city of Aceh province in July 2005. The presentation is not a theoretical or empirical one. Rather it is a personal account of how she reacted to the various aspects of this experience while she was in Aceh and after she came back to Philadelphia.