Every place I’ve been, there have been cell phones. Farmers in Malawi have them. Teachers in Samoa have them. Young kids in America have them. In Mandalay, they don’t have them. Yes, they exist here, but they are
expensive. $300 for the cheapest phone,
$300 for a SIM card. I heard the prices
will be coming down, but they would have to come WAY down before I’ll invest in
one.
My apartment smells like poop. And it’s not because of anything I did. It doesn’t always smell this way, but
occasionally, there’s a definite odor of sewage. Apparently it comes from the drains. Someone suggested I use incense but then it
would just smell like shitcense.
I took my first spin on a motorcycle. Admittedly it was just circling the drive in
front of the school, but I did ok. With
a little practice, I’ll be ready to hit the road. But I have some concerns. Traffic here is crazy – people driving the
wrong way down the street. People making
random turns. There is no
insurance. The nearest healthcare for
any even moderately serious issue is Bangkok.
Several other teachers have been in accidents. Sometimes their fault, sometimes not. While I want the freedom a bike would give,
I’m worried about getting hurt. I have
to climb stairs to my apartment and my classroom. If I end up on crutches I’d have a tough
time. Right now I’m leaning toward
getting a motorcycle to use to tool around the countryside and stick with taxis
in the city.
Wait until you see the new paint job on the front doors to
my classroom. They used to be
beige. My class is officially “First
Grade Yellow”. There’s also First Grade
Red and First Grade Blue. The first week
of school we decided to name our class.
The kids created a list of yellow things then voted and selected
Sunflowers. I was relieved, since some of the other
options were PE Uniforms (theirs are yellow), shoe and cheese. The door is now painted like a field of
sunflowers. It is beautiful!
It’s now Thursday evening.
After another trip into town last night to shop, I won’t be riding a
motorcycle in town. That will
significantly limit my mobility but the traffic is simply too horrendous and
dangerous. At one point last night I was
looking out the window of the bus at the family of four riding on a motor bike
next to me. Then a truck swung into
their lane and they were almost crushed between our bus and the truck. Not enough room to move ahead to get away and
barely enough room to slam on the brakes and miss being squished to death. That kind of thing is common.
At one point there were at least 30 motorcycles stopped in
the middle of an intersection – trying to either get across or turn left into
the lane that was trying to get across.
Many were facing on-coming traffic, which included our bus, heading at
them and not slowing. They had nowhere
to go to get out of the way. Even if I
could manage it without incident, I’d be a nervous wreck. My decision was confirmed when I got
home. Walking upstairs to my apartment I
tripped on the last step and went down on all fours, with my groceries
scattered about. I think it was God
saying “Dummy, you can barely walk, do you really want to try to take it to
another level?”
I’ve looked for a couple of items at three different stores
and haven’t found them. Flour and maple syrup. I didn’t expect it to be real maple
syrup. Or even good maple syrup. Just some kind of Karo thing, since French
toast is one of my go-to meals when I’m too pooped to cook.
The other thing?
Flour. I know they have it
because they have bakeries. Where they
sell tasty éclairs for $.50. And whole
wheat bread. So they must have
flour. Several of the other teachers
share my fondness for Mexican food. One
kind gent even said he’d share a can of refried beans which he got in
Bangkok. We have all the ingredients for
guacamole and salsa and they’re easy to make.
I could whip up some flour tortillas if I could find flour. Plus, the guys checking out at the store in
front of me had some peppers that looked like a cross between poblanos and
cubanelles. I’ll check those out next
trip to the store.
I’m ¼ of the way through next week’s lesson plans, which
should mean I won’t spend all day Saturday working. That would be nice. I plan to hire the tuktuk driver I heard
about and see how that goes. It’s amazing
that I’ve been here almost 3 weeks and still have seen so little of anything
but my classroom. It’s been fine,
especially when I first arrived and was both sick and jet lagged, but now I’m
ready to play tourist.
Well, I’m officially angry and frustrated at the school this
morning. I overslept a bit this
morning. I like to be up by 6 at the
latest so I can get dressed and have breakfast and still be out the door by
6:30. This morning I didn’t wake up
until 6:15 and rushed to get out by 6:35.
That may seem fast to some, considering that involves showering, blow
drying, makeup and dressing but when one is a natural beauty it can be done
quickly.
I was happy to arrive at school before the rain
started. Only 6:45, no one else there on
the internet so I could get some work done.
Possibly even get a lot of next week’s lesson plans finished. I have a routine in the classroom – first I
turn on the power. Next is the air
conditioning, since even though it’s only about 80 at that time of day, the
room is warm and stuffy. Next I turn on
the computer and log in. While the
computer does that, I fill my Hard Rock water bottle. Today I brought a special treat of lime juice
powder to add to the water. It’s
surprisingly tasty and refreshing, although I’m sure it’s mostly sugar.
All was going well.
Typical morning. Until I tried to
log in. I got a message that my account
had been disabled and I should check with the administrator. That means I can’t access the shared drive
which has all the work the students will be doing today, the videos for the
dance routines I use to transition from one subject to another and my
unfinished lesson plans. It also means
no access to the internet. Yesterday
Yahoo kindly blocked my account, apparently because someone in Myanmar was
trying to access it. Oh, that would be
me. I had to wait 24 hours to access
it. That would be this morning.
Internet is spotty here, it’s a country wide issue. At the school it is pretty much unavailable
after about 10:00 a.m. because there are too many users. I could come in late at night or really early
in the morning to have enough time on the internet but they turn the servers
off.
I’m fine with getting in at 6:30 am six days a week so I can
have internet access and do my prep work (downloading materials, etc.) But when I’m blocked from doing that, with no
warning, it pisses me off.
I suspect I was blocked because yesterday I asked the IT guy
for help in installing the most current version of the VLC media player so I
could watch the videos stored on the shared computer in the lounge in our
apartment building. When he tried to do
it, he found a virus on my external hard drive.
Since that drive was fine before I got here and I’ve only used it on the
computer in my classroom and the one in the lounge, it seems I had to get it
here. He said he would come to the
apartment to check out the computer there.
When I arrived he was gone and the computer was gone with him.
Since I’d agreed not to use my infected hard drive until we
could resolve the issue (it looks like he’s going to have to reformat it which
could mean losing everything on it), I’m not sure why he blocked access to my
account. All I know is I could still be
in bed, listening to the rain instead of sitting in the classroom with no
access to any materials. Grrrr.
By the way, my sunflower door is finally complete. It really is beautiful and the art teacher
put a lot of time into it. As a thank
you, the kids wrote thank you letters and I gave her a chocolate bar. She was thrilled. Chocolate is relatively expensive here ($2.50
for a Cadbury bar) and what young woman doesn’t like chocolate?
Birthdays! I’d been
warned about impromptu birthday celebrations.
Parents (or their servants) will drop off a cake and expect everything
to stop for a birthday celebration that might last an hour. Plus leave the kids on a sugar high for the
rest of the day, since the cakes normally arrive shortly after the start of
school.
Yesterday was the birthday of one of the kids and I was
prepared. I wrote “Happy Birthday,
Joseph” in giant letters on the white board and drew balloons. I mentally adjusted the lesson plans to
account for the change. When Joseph
arrived, he seemed a little embarrassed to tell me that there would only be a
party after school. No cake. I was relieved but also a bit
disappointed. No cake.
Later in the day I had the kids line up in order of their
birthdays so we could have a list and anticipate the impromptu parties. It went well over all but they are first
graders. One little boy knew his
birthday is in August but didn’t know what day.
Another boy, when I asked what day his birthday was, excitedly yelled
“Tuesday!” “This Tuesday?” I asked.
“No, December Tuesday!” Okay,
then.
Speaking of birthdays, isn’t it funny that one of the girls
and I share a birthday. Halloween. I had a job once where there were four of us
working together. It was a newly formed
group and the job I moved to Florida to take.
I was a bit surprised when I walked into the office the first morning
that the first thing anyone said to me was “When’s your birthday?” When I said Halloween my three new co-workers
started howling. It seems that three of
the four of us were born on Halloween.
We decided that was the criteria used in the selection process. They let the fourth guy in just so it
wouldn’t look like discrimination.
