Katherine Currier has been a full-time member of the Upper School English Department for the past 12 years. Most of the Upper School students know her as an energetic, engaging teacher, and some know that she is also the founder and faculty coordinator of Meet and Eat (a weekly lunch meeting where students can relax and share thoughts and stories away from the hectic pace of PD). Many people know that she is a former Miss New Hampshire who competed in the 2001 Miss America Pageant, and some are aware that she designs and creates jewelry, which she sells through her own company, Plume Jewelry. What most people don't know is that Currier spent several months living in Bali working with bone-carvers, and this was an experience that changed her life.
Katherine Currier was born and grew up in the town of Hookset, New Hampshire, which is about an hour northwest of Boston. She went to high school in Concord, which had both an academic curriculum and one that taught technical skills. This combination provided students with a wide variety of courses and opportunities that are not typically available in traditional schools, such as metal-smithing. It was through these vocational classes that Currier discovered that she had a talent for design.
Jewelry design and creation was just one of Currier's interests. Self-described as a "weird student," she says she was friends with everyone and was involved in everything: academics, sports, acting, singing, and dancing. When the time came to choose a path to take in college, she was torn between the visual arts and the performing arts. She chose the performing arts and attended Wagner University in Staten Island, New York City.
At Wagner, Currier took several classes in English, theater, and dance, but because the university is affiliated with the Lutheran church, she was required to take a religion course. So, she took a class called "Death and Beyond," and she was fascinated. She took as many courses as she could to earn a minor in Comparative Religions, and one of those was Eastern Religions, in which she learned about Hinduism. At the same time, Currier was also taking an anthropology course in which she studied Balinese culture, and this coincidence would eventually lead to her adventure in Bali.
During the summer before her senior year, Currier was at a restaurant and bumped into a man with an interesting accent. She asked him about it and where he was from, and he said that he was from England, but his job required him to travel to places like Bali. Having just studied that country and its dominant religion, Hinduism, Currier struck up a conversation with him. It turned out that he owned a company that procured fossilized bone carvings from Bali and delivered them to western countries to be used in jewelry. As an accomplished designer herself, Currier had several ideas about how he could prepare his rough pieces into finished products. By the end of dinner, they had hatched a plan for Currier to travel to Bali to work with the bone carvers in preparing carvings for western markets.
Currier would spend the summer after her senior year teaching herself Bahasa Bali from a book. Although the main language of Indonesia is officially Bahasa Indonesia and is spoken by nearly all of its citizens, Currier knew that learning Bahasa Bali would earn the trust and respect of the villagers she would be working with. And so, armed with her rudimentary knowledge of the language and 200 dollars, Currier set off for Bali.
Currier lived with a family on the outskirts of Ubud, a town known for its traditional crafts and lush landscape. Even though the family was relatively wealthy, they didn't have many of the common luxuries that most Americans are accustomed to, such as refrigeration, toilet seats, or toilet paper. They showered using cold water from buckets, and morning meals usually consisted of rice, eggs, and plantains, – and sugar ants. "There were these little ants in everything. You'd pick up an insta coffee, and there would be these little ants floating in there."
Despite these issues, Currier quickly adapted to life on the Pacific island. Her typical day involved eating breakfast with the family before jumping on the back of a motorcycle with one of the men from the family and hanging on as it weaved through chaotic traffic. She would often stop in Ubud to shop and barter or to have meetings with other artists. They would then drive up through the rice paddies to reach the bone-carving village.
In Bali, it's customary for each village to focus on one specific craft, like wood carving or bone carving. The artisans that Currier worked with used fossilized bones from common animals such as cows or deer and also from more exotic and rare ones such as mammoths or even saber-tooth tigers. These materials came from a range of places. Sometimes they were discovered by farmers plowing their fields, and other times they were purchased in markets. Currier recalls some craftsmen finding tiger teeth decorating old baby carriages. In general, the rarer the bone, the more expensive it is.
Once she reached the village, she would spend several hours meeting and talking with the artists about how to tailor their work to suit American tastes. Even though she spoke some Bahasa Bali, Currier often had to draw what she wanted them to create. She would also look at whatever they had already created, give suggestions, and place orders for specific types of carvings.
Currier recalls that trying to communicate in her limited Indonesian made the process challenging, and “my brain would hurt at the end of the day. I’d start dreaming in Indonesian, and I was always thinking around the words I didn’t know in Indonesian, even in my dreams. So, I was exhausted all the time.”
One thing that Currier found interesting was the way the Balinese would take frequent breaks from work. "Everyone would work for about two hours, and then suddenly everyone was playing badminton, which is the national sport of Bali. You'd just move the chickens out of the way and start playing." Currier also enjoyed the cultural tradition of providing refreshment to visitors. “Everywhere you went, people were offering you food and drink.”
Currier says that the Balinese people are incredibly generous and kind. During her time there, she got very sick, and the mother of the family took care of her. Currier recalls her sitting by her bed, holding her hand, wiping her forehead with warm compresses, and gently massaging her shoulders. "It was as if she decided that since my mother wasn't there to take care of me, she was going to be my mother."
She also appreciated the opportunity to be fully immersed in the culture. She was invited to important family events, such as funerals and weddings, each of which lasted for three days. For these events, she dressed and wore makeup in the same manner as the people she lived with.
When she attended the wedding and funeral, Currier learned of another significant difference between American and Balinese cultures: a person does not need to request time off from work to attend to personal or family matters. If something comes up, the expectation is that you will leave work to deal with it; you don't even need to inform your employer that you're leaving.
She even attended a sacred meeting of high priests on Mount Agung. "It was incredible. There were all of these men around dressed in white. It was an out-of-body experience."
Unfortunately, after just three months of living in Bali, Currier's grandfather became gravely sick. Because he was unlikely to recover, she made the decision to return to New Hampshire to be with him before he died. Her re-entry into American society was not a pleasant one.
"The bigger culture shock was coming back [to the U.S.]. I was just in Bali, living with these super-peaceful, loving people, who have nothing but will give you the shirt off of their back. [Or] I’d been in Ubud, going from vestibule to vestibule with all of these products made in these villages, eating Masakan Padang from a kabuk, which is like a road-side shed, and it was fifty cents for the most phenomenal food."
"[And then] I'm in Walmart in Hookset, New Hampshire, buying stocking stuffers. People were fighting and pushing – and the crowds – it was like the worst culture shock, but on the other end."
To this day, Currier wishes her time in Bali had lasted a little longer, but she'd always known that it wasn't going to last forever. As she says, "It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I jumped on it." Although she has never returned to the island, her time there was deeply impactful. She lived among kind, loving people in what she describes as "paradise on earth," And, while she no longer worked with the company that exported bone carvings, she continued to design her own jewelry and eventually started her own business.
Currier's three months in Bali changed her life in many ways, but most significantly, it instilled in her a desire for adventure. "It sparked in me the travel bug. I traveled minimally as a kid, but always to resorts and [so-called] safe places. After that [experience of living in Bali], I was like, 'I want to experience things that are outside the norm – things that will really shape and shock me.' After that, I will try anything."
Katherine Currier hopes that all PD students, faculty, and staff will have the opportunity to travel some day. As she puts it, "Traveling to another country gives you the chance to experience something new, to get out of your comfort zone, and to be pushed and challenged in ways you can't get at home." Traveling to other places isn't just about learning about other cultures, it's also about learning about yourself. It's an experience that can be not only life-changing, but it can also be life-defining.