Life in the Ring of Fire Part 20: Back to School

Monday I awoke to discover a potential downside to my new house: the fact that it’s located about twenty feet from the school’s bell. Now, a bell in Vanuatu is usually an old, empty compressed gas canister that some hapless sucker has to bang on with a piece of metal (I don’t know where all these gas canisters come from, I have yet to see a full, functioning one being used for its intended purpose). It makes a terrifically horrendous noise that is audible all throughout the village, but is downright painful if you happen to be in the immediate vicinity, such as at my house. The first bell rings at 6:30 every morning to wake up all the teachers and boarders, and I have yet to sleep past that hour on a school day (so I guess it works), even when I don’t have to teach class until the afternoon.

The first day of school, of course, started late as many parents had put off the task of registering their children until then, so the office was swamped with families signing their kids up for school. We didn’t actually get started until around ten in the morning (we’re supposed to start at 7:30), at which point we’d already missed my one class for the day, which runs from 7:30-9:30. This turned out to be irrelevant, however, as I was the only eighth grade teacher than bothered to show up, and so I got the class for the whole rest of the day. This was far more time than I had prepared for, and I also felt a little uncomfortable jumping into the material when my class, which is supposed to have 17 kids, totaled a whopping six that day. Having nothing really else do to, I reviewed some topics from the previous year and assigned some class work (ie. busy work, but what else was I going to do?) and let them out early. The following day was a repeat of the first, except my class size made it up to ten. I also made an interesting discovery, which is that the presence of a teacher is more or less irrelevant to ensuring classroom discipline. Unlike at the school I’d observed in Vila, where complete chaos reigned despite the presence of a teacher, or even in the US where a teacher ducking out of a classroom results in an instant party, the students at my school obediently sat at their desks and faced forward for hours while the English teacher failed to show up. They are also masters of pretending to work. No matter how many boring day jobs you’ve had where you’ve needed to learn to quickly minimize minesweeper and pull up a random spreadsheet whenever you boss walks by, you still have nothing on these kids. I’ll put some questions on the board, which require the writing of approximately ten characters to answer (ie. three yes or no questions) and could be completed in about a minute even by those with no clue about what they’re doing, and watch the class descend into furious scribbling and frantic passing back and forth of various straight edges, rulers, compasses, protractors, erasers, and white out. I’m betting I could probably let such activity go on indefinitely without a decrease in the apparent busy-ness. “What the hell are you guys doing?!” I want to shout. Finally, I throw in the towel and ask them to just turn in what they have, even if they’re not finished, and watch the whole class in unison get up to hand in their papers, every one of the complete. They are also ridiculously neat to well past a fault. Every assignment that gets turned into me is complete with perfectly straight borders (if I gave them enough time I’d probably get papers with borders decorated by flowers and vines and tiny cherubim and looking like a hand-copied bible from the twelfth century). All questions written on the board are copied down, word for word. The figures I draw are identically reproduced, crooked lines, sloppy angles and all (because, of course, I really couldn’t care less about what my figures look like, as long as they get the point across). Everything is also color-coded, with numbers appearing in black, symbols (such as the addition sign) in blue, and text in red. Every assignment I give I stress that such things are unnecessary and to please focus on the math, but secretly I’m afraid that if I do succeed in channeling such tireless and patient perfectionism into something more useful, they’ll quickly discover how to genetically engineer themselves a race of obedient super-mutants and take over the world.

Starting Wednesday most of the other teachers and students finally showed up, which made my days a lot easier as I no longer had to make up work for my half-class to do to cover for the absence of all the other teachers. However, come Friday, I was still a very tired, frazzled, and humbled man. It was actually kind of nice to have the coming of the weekend mean something aside from the fact that the bank would be closed, as it gave a lot more motivation to actually do something fun as opposed to just sitting around, and so McKenzie and I came up with an excuse to have a party. Louis, a friend of ours from Bolivia who had been hired to oversee the construction on cell towers all over the island, had been considering allowing his contract to lapse and heading home at the end of February. Thus, a goodbye party was in order (he actually decided to stay on until May or June, but we weren’t about to let that stop us from having a party). Laura and Elin came down for the occasion and we decided to pull out all the stops as far as menu was concerned: chips and guacamole (a real pain in the ass in Vanuatu as you have to first make the tortillas and then fry them to make tortilla chips) to start, followed by sushi, then carne guisada, then pepper steak and, finally, cake. Of course, everything was to be accompanied by homemade beer. Sushi turned out to be the biggest obstacle (those sushi chefs make it look so easy). We’d elected to go with tuna and California rolls, thus requiring cucumber, avocado, fresh tuna, and crap, basically the only sushi-worthy ingredients available in the country. Fresh tuna’s always easy to come by in a country where fish that’s more than a few hours old is considered rotten, and the market in Lakatoro sells crabs tied up with pandanas leaves at a dollar for twelve. However, crabs, as it turns out, are really squirrelly and not easy convinced to climb into a pot of boiling water to be cooked. This I found out the hard way when I released the first crab from his bonds and was promptly bitten, dropped the crab, and watched him wedge himself behind the oven. I spent a good couple minutes prying him out with a machete and the following ten minutes chasing him around McKenzie’s house with said machete. All the remaining crabs were dumped into the pot without being untied.

Most of Friday and all of Saturday were spent cooking, which was OK as the only other thing we had planned for that weekend was the eating of the food we were cooking, and the party, on Saturday night, was a huge success. There ended up being just seven of us: myself, McKenzie, Elin, Laura, Louis, and two of Louis’ colleagues, and WAY too much food and beer. However, this was the first time any of us had had actual food or actual beer in several months, so we weren’t about to let it go to waste and thus were up until about four in the morning polishing everything off.

On Sunday we had to take Elin to the hospital, as she’d developed some sort of painful eye infection. It was my first trip to the hospital, but my hopes weren’t terribly high as I knew from word of mouth that the nurses tended to only make one of two diagnoses: either malaria or a boil, and generally prescribed amoxicillin for both (questionably helpful for a boil, completely useless for malaria). The only reason we had decided to go was at the advice of Peace Corps’ nurse, who had heard that they might be able to perform some sort of test. Plus, it was on the way to the beach. Louis picked us up around noon, when we finally stumbled out of bed, and brought with him the remainder of the beers from the pervious night, which we promptly dug into (remember, no open container laws, or drinking while driving laws, or, really, any laws at all). We pulled up to the hospital and I was voted the most medically knowledgeable (not really sure why) and thus given the job of taking Elin in and trying to explain to the staff why she had neither malaria nor a boil in her eye. I left my half-finished beer in the car, so as to appear a more qualified medical authority, and the two of us walked into a small room occupied by two nurses. We were taken into an adjoining room, which looked kind of like something you might see playing the part of a World War II military hospital in a movie, where one of the nurses looked underneath Elin’s eyelids to check for boils. Finding none, he poked around the piles of medical supplies for a while and then wandered off muttering something about finding a flashlight. About five minutes later he returned, without a flashlight, stared into Elin’s eye again, and gave us a bottle of eye drops and a bag of antihistamine pills. I asked about the test our nurse had suggested and he told us that the guy who knows how to do it wouldn’t be in until the following week. I made a mental note to myself to try and avoid future trips to the hospital and then called back our nurse, who, when I related the events at the hospital, put Elin on the next flight to Vila.