Reminding myself

Ssssh. Quietly. Don’t wake me up. Another couple months of sleep… Then I can despertarme in Latin America.

It’s a rather productive slumber though. I’ve added some legitimate words to my resume, and I’m probably in the best physical condition of my life thus far. Granted I can’t run the 12 miles to the top of Higgins Canyon like I did in high school, but going to the gym takes longer now that I sometimes have to wait for the lumpy dudes in tank tops to put back the weights I want.

But I am managing not to identify with these changes. I guess I demonstrated my non-identification with the job when I gave my notice, and as entertaining as the physicality is, I am aware that it will melt off with astonishing speed, most likely before I say a single word in Spanish.

Hopefully what will stay with me are the things I’m learning. For example a few fundamental things to do/be as an English teacher. I wish I could go back to Nepal and be presumably much more productive.

And things I’m re-learning. My brothers, my sisters, I have seen a face of the enemy! It is a versatile threat, sometimes sleek, sometimes hulking, but can almost always be identified by the license plate at the back. Behold! The automobile is no friend to the human species! Perhaps I just lost my US citizenship in saying that, but my tragic affection for Porsche 914s notwithstanding, these exoskeletal beasts of internal combustion mayhem are the death of us, even when they leave our bodies unscathed, and the first thing they run over is our interpersonal humanity and reasoned thinking. The Belgians never saw it coming.

Belgians obey the rules. They wait in line, they pay their bills on time, they vote, save money and respect authority. It’s the underlying reason why the society is so functional, stable, and boring. Yet they drive like spoiled children on their way to the cake table! US drivers sometimes zip through a light as it turns red, but holy crapola, that doesn’t come close to what they do here. In a class last week I was commiserating with a French woman about how people here keep going through red lights, clogging the intersection with several cars who really should have stopped. Then of course the people blocked from going the other way glower and lean on their horns, then repeat the behavior at the next light. La Francesa  assured me, “non non, we do not do zis in France.”

And I don’t want to give my poor mother high blood pressure, so I won’t tell you about the tailgating. At freeway speeds. Are we sure Nascar didn’t originate here?

Even K! My own little evening primrose is far more angelic than some chalk-faced cherub in a church, but if they drove like that in the heavens I would expect a whole lot more thunder and lightening.

Or maybe I’m just a crotchety old man already. (Oh crap, did Andy Rooney’s spirit move to my body? Heaven forbid. Chalky cherubs forbid.)

In fact, I fear I’ve done it again: focus on details that are interesting to me but sound like bitching and moaning. So allow me to be clear: I love Belgium.  I have a deep affection and respect for this country and her people. K’s family in particular is a group of people who anyone would be blessed to know. While I will of course miss my family during the holidays, if I am spending them away, I couldn’t ask for a better place to do it. I have enjoyed my year (& a half) here, and would not mind coming back in the future.

That being said…get me the fuck out of here. Two (& a half) more months. Okay, I can do this. I can handle traffic jams. I can pass people with the deep creases of the chronically displeased between their eyes without slapping them and screaming “You have food! Water, shelter, clothing, medicine! No one is trying to kill you! Cheer the fuck up!”

Maybe, if I try real hard, I can even love them as my fellow man, and learn from the epidemic of non-appreciation that infects the West.

When I see some gross example of petty conflict, like road rage at a stop sign or bitching customers, I used to smile or even laugh in an attempt to block the negative energy from touching me, and just maybe helping someone near me keep the same perspective. But now, as I stand at the crosswalk watching people drive like sociopaths, that laugh sounds cynical, snarky and bitter. (Not to mention condescending and obnoxious.) I don’t want that!

So I take a quick dream-trip back to Stanyard Creek, on the island of Andros, in the Bahamas, in 1998. A couple hundred people in a town so small they hadn’t formalized the spelling, Stanyard, Staniard, however else you liked. There were two dirt streets, one on either side of a tidal river, then a few others that were more like paths dressed up for Halloween than actual roads.

On paper it was sheer poverty: no jobs, no commerce, and most of the food came from gardens and the day’s catch. As far as I’m aware there was neither a doctor nor police (when “Cracker” one of the leathery-faced older guys with eyes blasted nearly colorless by a life of the sun’s reflection on the sea got drunk and knifed somebody, it was a handful of village men who dealt with it; I’m not sure how, but I never saw him take a drink).

People passed on the street with the Bahamian greeting “alright alright,” treating the handful of us white kids the same as everyone else. We were invited to attend the local church if we wanted, with warmth and caring whether we accepted or not. We alternated meals between the one “restaurant”, the one “hotel”, and the town mayor’s house. (Wendy at the restaurant made the best soup, the hotel always had fresh fish, and the mayor made the best conch fritters.) In the evening Wendy would put on music, and the locals would dance with us, without a hint of mockery at our stiff movements. (It’s not entirely our fault, they were great dancers.) We were always welcome to join in the nightly game, whether it was volleyball, basketball, or soccer.

Granted I was 17, abroad, had a huge crush or three, and was swimming in the Caribbean every day, so there may be a tad of golden hue to my hindsight, but the juxtaposition with any wealthy suburb in the world shines clear and confident in my mind.

So the stressed out guy in the Range Rover behind me in traffic can keep his status symbol car, his lifestyle, his bald spot, and his mansion he never sees. I’ll take a bus. I’ll take a dingy hostel room. I’ll take smile lines over stress creases.

Alright alright.

Just my two cents.

This isn't really a post, I just wanted to respond to a friend's facebook status, but without leaving a paragraph no one would read...so I'll put it here...where it can more easily be not read.

(The post was over which countries are more polite, with assertions that Americans are more polite than Europeans.)

It’s one of my inconsistencies that I think such broad generalizations are inherently pretty useless (no nation is that homogeneous) yet find myself interested in them and making them myself.  So I won’t pretend to be an expert, but having traveled in 39 countries I can offer my impression.

With regards to politeness, the US varies so immensely it is almost obscene (see: political discourse, racism, sports fans) but if I put my rose-tinted glasses of optimism on, I would rank us as near the top for politeness in interactions with strangers.  We smile and nod on the street, hold doors, talk to waiters and cashiers, and ask each other how it's going.  (That last one in particular amuses people here, particularly on the phone.)

(I would say this politeness is more common in smaller communities, since cities are more of a nationality in themselves, regardless of which country they happen to be in, but that's another topic.)

So I would say America does very well…but only compared to other developed countries.  (I have not been to Japan.)  I have yet to find a single developing country that doesn’t kick the holy crap out of the US when it comes to hospitality and manners towards strangers*.

(* Caveat that this exempts a few highly-touristed zones, where the unscrupulous will try and rip you off, though even then I can only think of one country where I felt this way.)

From Guatemala to Zambia to Nepal, the level of openness and friendliness towards strangers beggars our behavior in the West.  Of course it is not universal, there are assholes in every land, but I think one learns a lot about hospitality, priorities, and humanity from traveling in undeveloped countries.

Which reminds me of one image that continues to amaze me.  In this secondhand anecdote it was in Kenya.  If someone gets on a bus to find it empty but for one other person, they will go sit next to that person, to talk.  I just love that.

My two cents.

Gratitude and siblings

After posting that blog last night I went into the kitchen and started chopping veggies for dinner, and on the last cut of the onion sliced into my thumb.  Not too bad, but there’s a chunk of nail and skin hanging off, and blood started flowing, and much to my disappointment I got a little shaky.  Damn, I wanna be a mountain man who shrugs away compound fractures!

But I sat down for a minute to let the nausea pass and was thinking it’s not too surprising that I don’t like seeing my own blood.  After all, I’ve gone without seeing it much, at least since childhood’s continuously skinned knees.  And that lack of injury is something to be grateful for.

And holy cannoli, do I have shit-tons to be grateful for!  I look down at my clothes alone… 

My belt…I set my favorite belt aside when I packed up the rest of my stuff in Santa Cruz three years ago, then forgot to put it on the morning I left.  My brother drove me to the airport, and when I noticed I was beltless he immediately whipped his own off and gave it to me.  That was three years ago, and the belt’s come with me just about everywhere.  And he is still sagging like a homeboy.

Hanging on the back of the chair next to me is the black hoodie sweatshirt I wear to the gym, given to me by my other brother when he heard I didn’t have one.  Hanging on the retro coat rack (cuz we’re stylish like that) is my waterproof layer that a pequeño Spanish innkeeper on the plains of La Mancha gave to a poor shivering pilgrim.

Looking at this list I feel a tremendous gratitude (and a little embarrassment at my apparent lack of preparation and shopping skills) for the gifts I’ve been given, and these are just a few physical ones!

Another place in Spain gave me a hand-me-down cap that protected me from the sun all the way to Zambia where I traded it to a guy at a river-crossing for a wood carving to give to a friend who had donated very generously to our fundraising for the orphanages there.  Is there a blessing greater than friendship?

My folks were here in September (which is yet another thing to be grateful for) but I was surprised when my mom asked if we really enjoyed Nepal.  I guess my blogging tended to focus on the odd and sometimes uncomfortable aspects, just cuz I think they make interesting tidbits, but I was startled and frankly ashamed to not have expressed just how fantastic our time in Nepal was.

I mentioned two of my three brothers already, all of whom are fantastic buds that a guy is lucky to have, and all of whom I am proud to call my kin (plus my sister!  I could go on but I feel like I’m bragging.)  I am already blessed by them, but in Nepal I picked up more.

K and I lived in a room, in a building, next to a school, in a neighborhood, outside of Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.  The owner of the building was a…shall we say: taciturn…little fellow, and though his wife smiled enthusiastically and greeted us with a robust “Namaste!” every morning, her total lack of English (and our Nepali being limited to “My name is Tilak, I like vegetables and the color blue”) made a more substantial friendship rather difficult.

But we were far from bereft of friendship, because in the school next door (Kalika, one of the two schools we taught in) lived Saroj Subba and his wife Anita (I never saw it written, so I’m not sure if that is a westernized form or not).  Subba Sir is a teacher at Kalika as well as the property guardian, and was our liaison and assistance with all things scholastic.  (That's K and Subba Sir on the third floor.)

Anita made our dal bhat, twice a day, delicious without exception, all summer long.  The guest culture of Nepal is “The guest is a god” which included not letting us help with the preparations or clean-up, but we enjoyed a nightly game of seeing how much we could get away with helping.  By the end I could sometimes wash a few plates before she ran me off, and K was allowed to help cook.  (Which is great because now she makes a mean dal bhat herself.  Here she's crushing garlic and ginger with the big stone roller.)

But Subba and Anita were much much more than just our feeders.  They invited us into their home, in all the profound senses of the word.  They invited us into their faith, culture, and family.  Some of my favorite memories of Nepal are participating in the Hindu rituals of their humble home.

One of those rituals was Janai Purni.  (Note: I will describe it according to my experience and explanation of it while there.  When I looked online for confirmation, I basically found the same article plagiarized on half a dozen different sites, which describes something different from what we experienced.  Thus this disclaimer.  This blog is not a text on Nepali Hindu-Buddhist tradition, just what I learned while there.)

Where was I?  Janai Purni!  Janai Purni takes place on the first day of Gai Jatra, the weeklong Festival of the Cow.  Gai Jatra is another whole post, in fact it’s second on my longstanding mental list of post-to-be.

On Janai Purni we were invited up to the Subbas’ room (Subba is their surname, but what Saroj Sir went by most of the time) where we had a tikka ceremony, but with something extra.  After lighting the Ganesh lamp and incense, Anita performed a ritual cleansing with a pinch of rice (which absorbs your sins/impurities and is then thrown out the window) and sprinkling of water, then blessed me, as my sister, and tied a Janai around my wrist.

The Janai is a sacred thread that seems to have two manifestations.

The first (according to my googling) is as a marker of male adulthood, and is bestowed in a ceremony called Bratabandhan.  This Janai has three threads, which represent body, speech, and mind, and when the knots are tied by a Brahman the wearer gains complete control over all three.  He must wear the thread for the rest of his life.  We did not have a Bratabandhan ceremony.

Janai Purni (or Purnima) is the day when these threads are changed, if they have become frayed or defiled (for example by touching a woman who is menstruating), and for us it was a single thread, which granted protection from evil spirits.

Anita had already blessed me, and afterwards I blessed her in kind, including a tikka and a ritual gift of money.  (My Western money-consciousness wished I had known this beforehand and so brought more cash with me, to sneakily pay them back for all their hospitality, but I’m not sure this would have been appropriate.)  This two-way blessing was repeated by K and Subba Sir.

Then the sisters served the brothers a portion of a special rice pudding, with dried dates, coconut, and raisins, which tasted better than anything, eaten there in a familial circle on the floor of their room, which was fairly Spartan in décor, but luxurious with hospitality.  Subba set aside a little of the pudding as an offering to his mother, who died the year before.

The Janai on this day is tied onto each man by his sister.  So when Anita tied one on me, and K tied one on Subba, done in appreciation and recognition of our time together, they became our brothers and sisters.

So I have four brothers and two sisters, spanning the West Coast of the US all the way to the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.  And more blessings than I can count.

Another week in the life.

Wait, wasn’t my last post about time moving quickly?  Sheeyit, I guess it’s a theme because where did those last couple weeks go?

Do we all agree time goes faster when you’re in a routine?  When it’s all familiar, unthreatening, and you have a good idea of what they next day is going to be like, that’s when the years act like months, the months look like weeks, and the weeks barely fit on your watchface.

When I started traveling I didn’t know where I would sleep that night, where my next meal would come from, and what anything would be like.  After a year of this feeling it was only three weeks in.  That’s an extreme example, and even then, the months started squirting away like that unripe cherry tomato on your plate at the fancy restaurant.  (Just use your fingers next time.)

I thought I have enough uncertainty these days to keep them crawling, but I guess even if a day lasts a long time, it can be part of a fast week.  Can I even remember last week?

Monday…  Oh yeah, I had the day off so took the bike ride between Flemish farm fields to have lunch with K in our sandwich place, with kinda weird amateur drawings on the walls: a horse’s head, a duck flying, and a serious-looking baby with a bowl of spaghetti overturned on his head, noodles leaking down his neck and their misspelled slogan “no nonsens pasta.”

It had been closed for renovations by a new owner, and we were eager to see the new version.  They put on nice tablecloths, removed the perchy bar, and painted it off-white, slightly violet and whatever.  We weren’t sure if we liked the random old stuff, but now…the funkiness is gone, man!  It’s basically just like a million other “proper” restaurants in Belgium/Western Europe/The West.  Boooooring. 

Faux-elegance is a stand-in for actual personality.  (And real elegance is even worse, like boasting of that lack of personality.)

Tuesday my first class was late enough that I could go to the gym first.  The gym is my best local site for people-watching, and I am enjoying learning the different crowds.  

-During the day: is quiet, like a singles’ club on really off-hours.  A few folks peering around, looking for each other, and showing off for the wrong audiences.  Some beefy lad pumps iron for housewives who look more frightened that titillated by his grunts.  Or that lady I mentioned awhile back, the blond in tight black spandex who comes and does lunges behind  my bench.  (Remember her?  She got embarrassed after I caught her farting.)

-Early evening: is the working folk, efficiently checking Exercise off their To-Do List.  They move faster, are in better shape, and don’t talk.

-Weekends and holidays: (unless it’s warm weather) are like the bars on Friday night, without the beer.  It is preening, strutting, and pissing contests among the males.  A stage crowded with solo acts.  Highly entertaining.

-Weekday morning, opening hour 8:00 AM: was a new one for me.  Turns out that’s Senior Time.  Silver Citizens crowd the stationary bikes and circulate, a few at a time, among the rest.  One distinguished fellow came to row next to me, and when I finished, a little lady with finely brushed hair and one of the squarest jaws I’ve ever seen came and took my place.  She looked at him, he didn’t look much at her.  When he got up and moved on, another retired fellow took his place.  This one looked at her, but she didn’t look at him.

I love humans.  We are all children on the playground.  Or maybe sniffing dogs.

Work on Tuesday and Wednesday was functional but forced.  Like when I tried to get new (to me) students to use the language in ways they weren’t used to from past teachers, and just looked at me in confusion.  I’m still on the learning curve…and feel like a bit of a fraud.  I fear I am less of a teacher, and more of a conversation partner who guides a bit and corrects your grammar.  Wow, that would be annoying in real life, yet people pay beaucoup bucks for it in private.

Especially for the intensive lessons!  They pay a boatload of cash to spend all day with a private teacher…we even go to lunch with them, speaking only in the target language.  I had a kid (23) on Wednesday who was there to learn coffee vocabulary, since he’s going to coffee school in London next month.

Okay, we’ll talk about coffee.  Only as soon as I started, he mentioned that no, he wasn’t interested in that at all, he’d learn it at the school, where he was going just for kicks.  Okay then.  So we talked about other stuff.  Like “tell me about your home town” which provided a glimpse into Belgian xenophobia.  That was awkward.

“In my town there are a lot of…strangers.”

“Okay, what do you mean by ‘strangers’?”

(Searching look.  Probably realizing I am an immigrant.)  “You know…foreign…Arab…  You know, terrorists.”  He continued “you can’t look at them, or they get angry.”

“Hmm.  Are there a lot of fights?”

“No.  Not for ten years.”

I am gratified that I still find it shocking when someone dismisses and judges an entire macro-group of people, even though it is a very common behavior.  So common in fact, that I’m going to do it right now.

There is a lot of anti-immigrant feeling in Belgium.  I’ll save my theories on why for another day, but I have to mention that sometimes I want to drive to the immigrant neighborhoods and twist some ears.  On the news last week was a mass brawl between immigrants from Turkey and (I think it was) Azerbaijan.  Started by a damn soccer game.

I’m sorry, but guys…GUYS!  You can’t do that!  You can’t come to a country where people, you know, behave themselves, and get in a gigantic brawl, throwing stones and shit, because your f-ing soccer team played!  (Not even if your great-grandfather was killed by his great-grandfather.  Sit down.)  You wonder why Belgians talk about you like that?

Obvious disclaimer: not all Belgians nor non-Belgians act in either of those ways, in fact, most don’t.

I got home Tuesday and Wednesday at quarter to nine at night, in time to scarf a bowl of cereal (there was no slot in the schedules for dinner) and go to bed.  That’s okay sometimes, but pretty quickly I find myself saying “I gotta quit this job.”  Especially after I realized today that I paid 57% of my earnings in taxes and fees already?  And there are more coming at the end of the year?  Can that be right?

The air is getting colder and the sun is gone by six.  Fingers on handlebars feel locked solid and the skin on the knuckles dries and cracks.  Cheekbones feel prominent as the skin on top stretches tight in the chill, and even at 8:30 PM the streets are abandoned, humans huddling together for warmth in front of cold television screens that never lived.

(Did I mention you should get rid of your TV?  The two Secrets to Wellbeing that I’ve discovered amidst all my profound cluelessness are to give up your TV and automobile; both are toxic to the human spirit.  But that’s a soapbox for another time.)

Thursday was back to Brussels for the follow-up “Consolidation Day” to formally end my teacher training.  I was eager to go, to see and catch up with my little teacher cohort.  We were originally 9, but 4 had to teach, and 1 has already left the country, but it was nice to see the other three and hear that I’m not the only one…

The day was run by the internally famous regional head honcho, a rather severe woman whose flat looks and minimal expressions (that seem disapproving) leave people stumbling and stuttering in an attempt to figure out what she wants from them.  How do I please this person?!?

Maybe it was having a small group, or that she was just back from vacation, I don’t know, but she was in rare form.  We went over a new tool to use in class, and in a demo lesson Dolly Parton came up as an example.  So here was the stern, inscrutable, and much-feared Chief Director of Something-Or-Other for Western Europe discussing Dolly’s boobs in the Causative: “Yes, she has had her boobs done.”  It was awesome.

You can only go forwards

The corn is gone already?  How the hell is the corn gone already?  I swear it was just pushing up through the furrows, looking all green and eager and naïve.  Now it’s rows of mass-mowed stubs, Winter’s five o’clock shadow, and I never even saw the monster harvesting machine.

(Okay, it hasn't snowed yet, but I had to use a picture from last year.)

Summer left its sun behind though; it’s shining away up there, enthusiastically bright, and we walk around with our eyes squinted.  For some reason we squinch our mouths tightly too.  But Summer packed up the warmth when it left, like a departing college student who can only fit the speakers in the car and leaves the stereo.  So the sun is telling a story about picnics, volleyball and shorts, but it’s a newscaster on a muted TV and we turn away distracted, to find something else to do, like getting the heavy coats out of the attic.

But I can remember that I like Autumn, gall-darnit.  It’s warm cup of tea season.  Mug of hot chocolate time.  Blankets and books and thick slippers.  And holy shit, you can’t beat the leaves.  Those fresh green ones are a delight to see, but these wizened reds and purples and yellows can hold a better conversation.

This is actually a nice window of time.  The cows with their inexplicably muddy posteriors lounge on grass still luxuriously green, while the leaves obligingly take aesthetically pleasing positions around them.  Martha Stewart’s a chump next to Mother Nature.  (Or anyone else for that matter.)

We danced like grasshoppers (or should I say base-jumping venom-spiting/peeing spiders?) all summer long in the Nepali sunshine, washed in Indian Ocean monsoon drops, but already my legs have forgotten shorts and my feet are accustomed to socks.  The tan lines of my sandals are completely gone and my gloves wait by the door for morning departures.

I find myself again in Belgium.  Still not quite able to function in the language, still stranded in the boonies, still wondering what the fuck I’m doing here.  Still bouncing between admiration and irritation for the local particulars too.  They give you tons of free samples in the grocery store!  They charge you for a glass of water.  Internationally-minded people speaking tons of languages!  Who abuse immigrants in all of them.  And of course, the great healthcare system that is emphatically NOT bankrupting the country, and where we can get quality medical care nearly at a moment’s notice for a few bucks…but they’re going to take half my paycheck.  Once you factor that in, this new job I start tomorrow seems kind of ridiculous.

(Note, if the taxes just went for the social system like healthcare and supporting those in need, it would be easier, but Belgium has an overabundance of governments, and I can’t help but suspect that a lot of those shiny euro’s of not-mine go to bureaucrats and their paperwork.  I think the medical system should be amended to not cover paper cuts…)

Teaching English in Nepal was so groovy, I thought hey, why not do it in Belgium?  That was my original plan after all.  So I spent the last 2-3 weeks following a training course that was really more like boot camp.  They broke us down with theories, prohibitions, and critiques until we were all convinced we had made a mistake and were not suited for the job after all, then deployed us throughout Belgium saying “you start tomorrow.”

Most of my students will be adults, but tomorrow my first paid lesson will be with a 7-8? year old.  (I find it odd that the company doesn’t seem to know how old he is.)  I will teach him, one on one, for an hour and a half, and once you take away the price of my train fare and taxes, for the 4-5 hours of my Saturday it will take, I’ll earn about 7€.  Score!  That will almost cover lunch!

But I’ll see it as a means to an end.  I’m learning more about this teaching shtick, and putting a known brand on my resume, and hell, I still hold out hope that it will be enjoyable.  At least for awhile.

But that reminds me, anybody have any advice on Latin America?

First week of teacher training

Tuesday October 4 – Taking the train home after Day 1 of teacher training, pulling into the station at Brussels North past shy behemoths of office towers loitering outside the station, waiting tragically for some executive to come make them feel loved.  Their profane expanses of reflective glass look best when punctured and shattered in the post-apocalyptic cityscape; it will take the end of the world as we know it to make them interesting.  I mean that in a good-natured way.  Those institutions are not a means for the growth of human happiness and wellbeing. I promise I’m not listening to Marilyn Manson and wearing big black boots with lots of buckles right now.

Class was a pleasant event.  Looks like work, and that’s a good thing.  Looks like quality people, and that’s a great thing.  My online TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) class was too easy/boring/non-practical, and learning is always worthwhile.

Cruising above traffic-constipated highways in a train that hums in a language fluent in speed is just plain fun.

Wednesday October 5 – I screwed up my demo lesson in class today worse than I’ve ever screwed anything up.  It was even worse than that time in freshman year of college when I didn’t prepare a Spanish presentation on Sor Juana based on prior “knowledge” of a book I (didn’t) read for another class, and tried to stretch the statement “Sor Juana was a nun” into a 5 minute presentation.

Luckily it was the best possible scenario for a failure, with an instructor who can frame it as a mixed bag, and a class who can benefit from it as a learning experience.  It wasn’t just me who flailed, it was us who learned…  Though it just felt like me at the time.

I spent the next couple hours uncomfortable and tongue-tied.

The commute-time train is full of businessmen in their fresh black/navy blue suits; the air smells like a clothing store, not real life, and has a unique hush of lots of people uninterested in talking to each other, or maybe they’re just as tired as I am.

A woman who looks like Joe Torre with greasy hair to her chin reads a famous Dan Brown novel on a platform as we slide past, standing apart from the businessmen.  She doesn’t look up as we pass by.  Neither do they.

The graffiti is scattered politely across warehouse sides and farm field fences, colorful, legible, and uninspired.  I’ve never tried that, seems like it would be fun.  Maybe if this teaching gig doesn’t work out, I’ll give it a try…  Your homework: tag 5 Starbucks.  Starbuckses.

Thursday October 6 – The vagaries of human ebb + flow reliably defy comprehension and stubbornly exist, so I’m the only one to get off the train at my small station today, and I ride home in a patiently-complacently peaceful suburban silence, luckily with Chet Baker’s Almost Blue in my ears.  In a backyard glimpsed between brick houses made entirely of 90-degree angles I see a brightly colored pinwheel spinning-shouting over bulgy plastic yard toys abandoned on their sides.  It is the only motion, outside my own, in a world that has been eaten by long work hours and television.  The former has relinquished its hold for the day, and the people have embraced the anaesthetic of the latter, which blink idiotically through window after window.

It’s a zombie movie, and I’m the only survivor of the plague, only the monsters refuse to leave their houses.

Friday October 7 – I can’t quite tell if I’m exhausted or eager in class, I think both.  All I know is a very unexpected degree of nervousness.  I’m uncomfortable in my own skin like I haven’t been since adolescence.

I’ve gotten off planes with no idea what to expect on 4 continents, and it never felt like this.

I find myself in a state of witness, detached, that I associate with physical danger.  When the infamous California riptide is keeping me away from the beach, and my limbs are getting sluggish in the cold.  Walking alone through a jungle that shivers in the rain to look for a rhino that the guide said was here before he disappeared, and my own feet look so small when I step in the tracks of the animal that could be behind any bush.  Walking, alone alone, through an unknown city at night where I know no words in the language and no people in the country and have no place to sleep tonight and am 90% sure those guys from the alley are following me now.  Walking alone alone alone through a village that seems abandoned other than the half dozen dogs who are surrounding me in growls and barking.

Those all felt fun, my heart smiling as it beat faster.  This classroom detachment is more like nausea.  Logically I find it unwarranted.

In the crowded train station I play the familiar game of trying to spot the pick-pockets among the crowd, college kids heading home with bags of laundry, and the businessmen with panic around their eyes as they negotiate sanity in an existence where they look forward to Friday all week, then get here and realize it’s just waiting in mild annoyance for Monday morning, when they’ll settle back to complaining about work with a sigh of relief.

(Oh, and that one businessman whose pants are way-hay-hay too tight.  Maybe he’s Italian…)

But that’s not quite right, I don’t feel anger or depression at these facefree hordes with briefcases in hand, instead I feel empathy and respect for the tragic and unimaginable sacrifices made with varying degrees of willingness to a system of profane selfishness, desperate need, and idiotic exigencies.  I wonder what the smiling poverty of Nepal would say on this subterranean platform.

But riding home I am filled with a screaming love for the world that wants to caress and smash the lot of it.  I love my fellow man but he needs a kick in the pants and a hug.

Saturday October 8 – When I heard it was a two week training, I kinda dismissed it; how much can you expect to learn in two weeks?  I am surprised at how tiring it is, especially when logically I understand it all, but just can’t manoeuvre it into anything functional.  But enough is enough for now, so I spent Saturday without a thought for this job, instead trying to catch up with the world through the forum of an email each to my mother and brother, and 64 emails of political/environmental/social causes and newsletters.  There are amazing and horrible things going on every damn blessed day.


My Saturday was with two of the amazing things.

Most of a lost post from Bhaktapur on teaching

(Doing a little house-cleaning, and too tired to write anything new, I found this post stuck in the drafts folder, from when the internet connection went out before I could post or finish it.  It is from the last week in Bhaktapur, after we got back from our vacation week in Pokhara.)

On the first day teaching again after our Pokhara Spring Break '11 it felt weird to walk into a classroom, stretching the stiffness out of teaching muscles (took about 10 minutes).  It was funny, touching, and a bit maddening how even the most chaotic class would go still and somber when I told them the next day was my last with them.

Yesterday was my last at Kalika, and as I walked out the gate there were little voices shouting "goodbye Tilak sir" (my Nepali name...did I ever tell you about that?) and little hands waving out the windows of the school bus.  Today was penultimate at Himalayan, and I was surprised and touched by how many kids said they would miss me.  The entirety of Class 7 wanted my autograph, even the girls who, up until now, I have barely been able to entice into uttering a word.

When a teacher walks into a Nepali classroom (at least at both our schools) the students all stand and say together "good morning teacher and namaste!" and when you leave say "thank you for teaching us teacher and bye-bye."  It didn't take too long before I really heard the thank you as genuine.  The kids here are a delight.  Their enthusiasm and good natures put smiles and happiness in every single day.  And they only drive you insane 12% of the time, not bad.

(One day we rode the school bus in the afternoon while it took the kids back to the farms outside the city, where many of them dropped their bags and went to work in the fields.)

I am guessing the classes are not that different from Western schools; peer influence is crucial and pivotal, the girls mature faster than the boys, when they are interested they participate wholeheartedly and when not interested/understanding their attention goes right out the window.  The differences as I see them now revolve around two things: the atrophied creativity of students in a system that relies entirely on rote memorization and repetition, and the increased physicality of a culture in which students are always smacking each other and teachers often punish students physically.  Yeah, the teachers here hit the kids.  Pretty hard and reliably often.  A solid portion of teachers carry sticks all day.

I don't agree with the corporal approach, but to be honest I was tempted once or twice because that is the fundamental structure they know, and so my words were ineffective (again, this was only in one or two cases...I'm looking at you, Himalayan Class 8).  The worst manifestation of it though is when teachers hit a student for a wrong answer.  Making mistakes in inevitable, especially in a language class, and if you punish a student for a mistake, s/he just stops trying in order to avoid them.

I think that is part of the reason behind the utter epidemic of copying that goes on in these schools.  When I collect homework or classwork (or even during K's poetry contest, pictured) I'll get the same words written in multiple student's notebooks, sometimes even in the same handwriting!  They are clearly not grasping the function of homework.

One thing that I imagine is different from some western schools but not others, is that disinterested or un-included students fall by the wayside and fall further and further behind.  There is no awareness or technique for dealing with learning disabilities here, nor for helping if a student just falls behind.  They come to school six days a week, 50 weeks a year, and to be honest the teaching method would bore me to tears too.  I am actually amazed by the kids who are still checked IN, when the school environment feels more like a daycare than a school.