I have always felt that when experiencing a place, the mode of transportation is equally important as the place itself. For example, to experience Sydney the most effective mode of transportation is the trains. It is the harbor that strikes you as you burst out of the underground tunnels of Wynyard that I am mildly homesick for.
In Chuuk, this form is the flatbed truck. With its absence of public transport and affinity for unnecessary fuel consumption, the island seems to revolve around the passage of these machines. The island’s economy (if it can be granted such a term) is completely dependent on it, but even more curiously is their role in the social life of its citizens. If one considers the number of people in flatbeds at any given time compared to the number of people on the island who actually need to go anywhere, one gets the impression that many of the passengers simply ride on the back of the truck to remind themselves that the other sections of the island are still there.
My daily commute back from Cecilia’s has made me particularly enamored of the flatbed lift. Originally, due to a combination of Ivan Milat and a vague knowledge of drunken Chuukese violence, I only accepted lifts from English speakers without handlebar moustaches. However, both fatigue and the local dogs led to relaxing such standards. They currently stand at ‘sober and non-threatening’. Even these less stringent terms have been applied creatively on the occasion.
The flatbed allows you an open air feel for the place. It is a view that allows you to admire the eccentricities of the buildings whilst fast enough to deny you the opportunity to ponder their structural integrity. The added bonus is the company, which, whilst wildly varying, generally does not speak English but remains strangely comfortable of this arrangement. On top of this, of course, is that it is fun. The shoddy roads are not nearly as nauseating as being in a closed vehicle and the feeling of wind through hair can be liberating after a tough days teaching. Best of all is the rain, to which you are completely and utterly defenceless and are thus led to an odd acceptance of your saturation. Overall, it’s a bit of a thrill ride.
But for all the wonderful things you see along the side of those metal rafters, nature demands that you are exposed to its wild negatives in almost equal parts.
By far the most eventful truck ride in my two months here has been the return from the inter-school athletics carnival. The carnival itself was, in true Chuukese style, bizarre. The competition included such events as coconut husking and basket weaving, but it was eclipsed by the crowd that came to watch. IT was gigantic. Considering that this meet is the closest thing to a regular sporting event on the island, the numbers attending are mind-boggling. Even the Chuukese police force, whose underwhelming policing methods deserve their own article, made an appearance on the pretence of crowd control. It’s the sort of non-threatening situation that they thrive on. To complement the size of the crowds was the style of cheering. It was enthusiastic, to put it gently. Whereas Western sporting events use rhythm and control to produce cheering (Aussie Aussie Aussie etc…) the Chuukese prefer to scream at the top of their lungs. Particularly animated were the women who run around the front of the crowd either dancing in an almost violent manner or smashing something on the ground, preferably somebody else’s umbrella, into small pieces. The most adept are able to do all of this at the same time.
Therefore, still in a state of slight culture shock, the day ended with me being bundled into a large red flatbed with a few staff and a multitude of Xavier boys. I soon learned that the truck’s distinctive colour was due to the incredible amount of rusting, which invariably ended up on my pants. And as the sun began to set on the Pacific, we began the trip back to the other side of the island.
The first notable instance was on the road that runs parallel to the airport runway. Roadworks has reduced the traffic to a sluggish pace at all times of the day but the flow from the athletics carnival exacerbated this. So, as we found ourselves filing along the lethargic road, we became aware of amazingly loud gangster rap behind us. The setting sun afforded us a glance at the source, another flatbed with a smattering of young-ish men with T-shirt’s on their heads (the height of fashion here) with their heads rising and falling in time with the music.
The students, with a strong disposition for hip-hop (though this stuff wasn’t quite as pasteurized and auto-tuned as their preferred variety), began joining. A couple of heads nodded, a couple of hands waved in sync with the sub-woofer driven beats. When the occupants became aware of this, they gave a sudden expression of joy. Had you seen them, you would have judged that this group of teenage boys, the majority of which don’t speak Chuukese, joining in with their gangster rap was simply the best thing ever. I find it difficult to describe the sheer ecstasy of this moment, but it was exhilarating to watch. Oh the small and simple things.
The traffic flowed on, and the car to our rear turned away, much to their disappointment. Along the roads we plodded; a few recognizing the school and shouting out name, even offering a few war-cries. For the boys, who had experienced these war-cries for twelve hot hours straight, their response was understandably muted. The truck rolled on.
Further ahead, we heard shouting and screaming. This is certainly not uncommon and even with only two months exposure the extent to which I am desensitized to it startles me. Even on the Xavier campus such noises barely grant the batting of an eyelid. However these were of an exceptionally loud quality that defied even our trained ears. It took a good couple of minutes until the source of the shouts came into view. At last we turned a corner to see a large crowd of people. And within it two young women. The whole scene was filled with a frenetic jostling. But even considering the shouting, screaming and jostling does not adequately express the fury of this sight. There was a wildness to these two girls; hurling what I assumed were obscenities at each other in Chuukese. It took at least twelve people to restrain them. The scene was most effectively summed up by one of the Americans, Sam, who said bluntly:
“I hope that she puts that rock down.”
But on a flatbed, you maintain your distance. You are not directly confronted by the sights you see. You are only an observer. Perhaps this explains my affinity for them. As we passed a village called Mitchitin there was the familiar sight of a makeshift wall of palm fronds in front of a house. It signaled the ubiquitous sight of a Chuukese funeral. Two of my students sat among the scattered crowd in formal dresses. We went past the lake, past the school I teach at. The sky was darkening, twilight was approaching.
We drove into the village of Peddia. I pass it every day in my walks from Cecilias. It stretches around a bay of polluted water and ends with an unspectacular bridge across an even more polluted river. I looked out for a few of my students who live in it.
Before the bridge a crowd of drunken men loitered on the road. This corner generally bears such a crowd, and they dispersed awkwardly to avoid the truck. Crowds of drunks generally begin appearing at five, though individual drunks can roam at just about any imaginable hour. Their cans of cheap Filipino beer litter every street. As we turned into the bridge, one heavily intoxicated man remained in the center of the road. The truck slowed down and the man turned towards us. It was only then that I saw the contents of the man’s right hand. It was a pachinko.
The pachinko is a local weapon. However I fear that I may disappoint you in revealing that it is in reality, just a slingshot. It is not far removed, and possibly less complex, than the type wielded by Dennis the Menace and appropriated by Bart Simpson. However, they are just about the most dangerous thing on the island. If their darts hit a particularly weak spot in the body such as the temple or the throat, death is pretty instant. Otherwise it can cause huge injuries. These things are vicious. The fact that slingshots, for us associated with lighthearted childhood mischief, instills significantly more fear than the gigantic machetes carried by all the men is one of the many odd things about this place.
So, brandishing such a comically dangerous weapon, he turned to the truck, raised it to his eye level, and with enough time for a desperate cry of ‘duck’, fired straight at us. From my newly acquired vantage point face down in the tray of the truck, I could not see how the shot eventuated. However, another teacher’s cry of “Is anyone hurt?” yielded no results. When I sat up, I saw through the back window that the window was cracked from top to bottom. This didn’t seem to faze the driver. As twilight grew we began the gradual ascent up to Xavier.
That’s why I like seeing Chuuk on a flatbed. You are thrown into both its joys and its horrors doled out in an approximate equilibrium. You share the same air, the same rain and the same dust as these things. But they are mere observances. The truck goes on. And all going well, you are still on it.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Resource Room
For two weeks now I have been working at a small school called St Cecilia’s co-teaching seventh and eighth grade reading and spelling with a Jesuit novice called Patrick. This has been wonderful, the kids make me laugh and they seem to listen to
me. And Patrick’s meticulous planning makes everything that goes on during those two periods remarkably smooth sailing. And with only a few falters such as my inability to give a convincing prayer at the start of class or work out how the faculty toilet flushes everything has been fine.
Complications occurred however on the matter of me teaching my own subjects. At one stage, I could of ended up teaching science. Considering that I had dropped Science at the beginning of year eleven and hadn’t really taken it seriously since year eight, I found this difficult to swallow. At another point I was going to take over Social Studies, much more favourable to my humanities flavoured taste; however the majority of the Social Studies course consisted of the history of Micronesia, of which I was certain the students would know more of than I do. I eventually ended up teaching a subject with the abstract title of ‘study skills’, which seems to defy description even of the people who teach it.
The one thing I was certain I was teaching was music. The first time I met Caroline, an American volunteer who teaches Maths at Cecilia’s, was on a sideline at a Cecilia’s vs Xavier soccer match. I was introduced as the new guy who was teaching there.
“Oh cool,” she said, “what can you teach?”
“I dunno,” I replied.
At this moment a long line of possibilities entered my head, from Ancient languages to basic psychoanalysis. It arrived, rather bluntly at a conclusion.
“Maybe music?”
It was an odd choice for me. There was no doubt I could teach it, I’d played instruments longer than I could remember and had helped teach my brother as well. But I had conflicting feelings about music since I knew what a treble clef was. I loved playing but loathed practising. I adored composing yet found theory about as enjoyable as removing my own pancreas. My music teachers were some of the best teachers I ever had, yet my time with music had also revealed a litany of eccentric weirdos who should be locked up, from my tyrannical Primary School bandmaster to the androgynous Nazis of the World Youth Day orchestra. I wasn’t sure I could teach a subject that I feel so conflicted about.
But I understood why I wanted to teach music on this island. The first Sunday mass up at Xavier blew my mind. The boys who lived in the dorm provided the music. There weren’t booklets of sheet music or pages of lyrics or even an overhead projector that I associate with mass music back home. Instead they sang the songs a cappella, breaking into three part harmonies with no directions whatsoever. Everyone on this island can sing and what’s more, can play my instrument of choice, the ukulele. They are all unbelievably musical, but they look completely lost at the sight of five-lined paper. Teaching music on this island was going to be the sort of opportunity I probably would not see again.
And so, with that moment of slight indecision, I ended up being the music teacher at St Cecilia’s. Of course, it still needed to be approved by the school, time was still needed to be made for me, and certain elements needed to be smoothed over. But by the beginning of last week it was settled that, at the start of the new quarter than began after Easter, I would teach eight grade music. And so I spent the week planning. And in order to plan, I had to actually find music.
I began by asking one of the nuns. I have had a life-long respect for nuns, they have an odd way of knowing exactly what is going on. It’s probably one of the perks of being married to the creator of the universe. I approached an old Chuukese nun who seemed to run a large proportion of the school’s affairs from a table in the teacher’s lounge. She opened up a room next to the teacher’s lounge that was dark and musty. As my eyes grew focussed to the light, I saw that the entire room was filled with books. It looked like the mother of all garage sales. She propped the door open with a piece of wood to let the light in and left me to my own devices.
It became clear to me that the entire contents of the room were donated to the school. Some of these boxes were even marked by the group that donated them, mostly community groups or other schools in America. It was very clear from the outset, however, that most of these donations were a failed venture. Whilst there were some extremely useful looking piles of textbooks the majority were clearly donated without any sense that these books were destined for a small Elementary and Middle school in the middle of the Pacific. As I looked further and further, I started to develop a list of favourites in my mind. They included...
> How to Program Your Atari Computer (circa 1980)
> How to Make Money in Local Real Estate
> The History of the American Negro (circa 1970)
> The Christian Approach to Sexual Education (circa 1972)
> A variety of ‘shock fiction’ novels from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (with tag-lines such as ‘I am your regular all-American girl next door, addicted to alcohol at seventeen’)
And my personal favourite, a music teaching program on vinyl records.
Despite spending a day foraging in the twilight of that room, I was only gifted with a series of music textbooks for a program clearly designed to get children to hate the subject of music. I spent the next day working through the music shelf in the library. The contents of the shelf were...
> SEVEN books of hymns
> One book of nursery rhymes (circa 1962)
> One outdated music textbook (circa 1973)
> One biography of David Bowie
I made a bet with myself that I would go through all of the books and leave the Bowie biography as a treat at the end. I began with the music textbook from the seventies. I am afraid that you readers will never be able to appreciate the book in the flesh, but to give you an idea, think interracial preteens in matching sweaters representing time signatures. Oh yeah. The highlight was a double page collage of pictures entitled ‘The Music Teacher’ wherein a middle aged man with mutton chops in a suede suit and a paisley shirt undertook various activities with teenagers dressed in the fashion of the day in what was then considered music class. I showed Caroline this and said that this was exactly the kind of music teacher I wanted to be. She told me that while she would be impressed if I could grow the mutton chops, western culture had already messed up the island enough without tan suits and paisley shirts.
I only made it half-way through the first hymn book. It blew my mind. I had previously believed that Anglicans had consistently the most boring hymns of all the Christian churches. The Anglican hymnbook is nothing compared to the mind-numbing blandness of the Mormon Church’s hymns. If I had to endure that once a week I would demand multiple wives. I gave up on the book of nursery rhymes when I realised that a song entitled ‘America’ had directly stolen its tune from ‘God Save the Queen’ (the anthem not the Sex Pistols song). I was so disgusted that I refused to read it any more. I spent the rest of the day reading the David Bowie biography to make myself feel better.
The third day called for the final frontier. It was a room next to the library, they called it the Resource Room. It was perhaps more aptly described as the ‘dump everything that looks vaguely useful’ room. I asked the nun for the key. She handed it to me, looked me in the eye and said simply, “Good Luck”
Oh how I looked.
I looked until it hurt to look anymore.
I levelled mountains of miscellaneous textbooks. I searched caverns of teacher’s guides to every possible form of mathematics humanity is yet to discover. I saw the word literacy so many times I felt unwell. At last, my eyes fell upon a box, the binding was fading. It read...
Music...
Of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
“Bloody Mormons” I shouted to myself, “there aren’t even any of you on this island anyway.”
And I collapsed in frustration behind a pyramid if textbooks.
I woke up at lunchtime. It’s actually quite hard to tell when it’s lunchtime because the younger years seem to run around playing no matter what time of day it is. But
when I spotted my eighth graders outside I knew for certain that it was. I gained my composure and walked across the room to the door, preparing to spend a good half an hour eating a peanut butter sandwich, talking to a couple of students and generally feeling sorry for myself. I turned the knob, pressed against the door, and realised to my upmost dismay that I had been padlocked inside the resource room.
My first thought was “who would actually want to padlock this room? What are they afraid of? Are the Mormons going to come and steal back their mass books? Is there anybody on this island who would actually want to read about basic algebra so badly that they would steal from a school?” After this series of rhetorical questions passed my mind, I then realised, with a touch of horror that I could actually be here for a very long time. I had not seen anyone else enter the room the entire time I have been working at the school. If there was any form of campus security then that was the first I knew about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to spend only one day before anyone would check the room, I would have to rely on someone noticing me missing and I had only been on the island for two weeks, that wasn’t exactly guaranteed.
Rather than resigning myself to this fate, I went up to the window to see which of my students I could possibly contact to get me out of here. Outside I noticed a particularly amiable eighth grader named Ratul. Ratul was a plump little guy with an odd haircut and a stupid smile that never seemed to leave his face. He said “yeah man” in an almost identical manner to a friend of mine from high school and we’d already created a secret handshake. I decided he was a pretty safe bet to get help.
“Hey Ratul!” I shouted a little bit pathetically out the window.
“Mr Joe? ”
“Hey Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room. Go tell Ms Caroline I’m here.”
“Yeah man.”
Ratul ran off, presumably to find Ms Caroline. I waited several minutes to be rescued, but there was no sign of either of them. I later found out that this delay was due to my accent, for what Ratul had heard was “Her Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room, DON’T tell Ms Caroline I’m here.” He ran off, quite happy to follow my orders but a little puzzled as to the bizarre variation of hide and seek we were playing. This, however, got me no closer to rescue.
It was Jerry, a local Chuukese teacher who also taught eighth grade that eventually found me. He was walking into the library when I pleaded to him. “Jerry, Jerry, I’m stuck, get me out.” Whilst about equally bemused as Ratul before him, he pulled out his keys and gladly freed me from the educational Bastille I had been stuck in. And as I walked into the fresh smell of outside, I thanked him for his efforts and shelved my plans for a battering ram made out of Mormon hymnbooks. And I was a little more determined to teach music at St Cecilia’s.
me. And Patrick’s meticulous planning makes everything that goes on during those two periods remarkably smooth sailing. And with only a few falters such as my inability to give a convincing prayer at the start of class or work out how the faculty toilet flushes everything has been fine.
Complications occurred however on the matter of me teaching my own subjects. At one stage, I could of ended up teaching science. Considering that I had dropped Science at the beginning of year eleven and hadn’t really taken it seriously since year eight, I found this difficult to swallow. At another point I was going to take over Social Studies, much more favourable to my humanities flavoured taste; however the majority of the Social Studies course consisted of the history of Micronesia, of which I was certain the students would know more of than I do. I eventually ended up teaching a subject with the abstract title of ‘study skills’, which seems to defy description even of the people who teach it.
The one thing I was certain I was teaching was music. The first time I met Caroline, an American volunteer who teaches Maths at Cecilia’s, was on a sideline at a Cecilia’s vs Xavier soccer match. I was introduced as the new guy who was teaching there.
“Oh cool,” she said, “what can you teach?”
“I dunno,” I replied.
At this moment a long line of possibilities entered my head, from Ancient languages to basic psychoanalysis. It arrived, rather bluntly at a conclusion.
“Maybe music?”
It was an odd choice for me. There was no doubt I could teach it, I’d played instruments longer than I could remember and had helped teach my brother as well. But I had conflicting feelings about music since I knew what a treble clef was. I loved playing but loathed practising. I adored composing yet found theory about as enjoyable as removing my own pancreas. My music teachers were some of the best teachers I ever had, yet my time with music had also revealed a litany of eccentric weirdos who should be locked up, from my tyrannical Primary School bandmaster to the androgynous Nazis of the World Youth Day orchestra. I wasn’t sure I could teach a subject that I feel so conflicted about.
But I understood why I wanted to teach music on this island. The first Sunday mass up at Xavier blew my mind. The boys who lived in the dorm provided the music. There weren’t booklets of sheet music or pages of lyrics or even an overhead projector that I associate with mass music back home. Instead they sang the songs a cappella, breaking into three part harmonies with no directions whatsoever. Everyone on this island can sing and what’s more, can play my instrument of choice, the ukulele. They are all unbelievably musical, but they look completely lost at the sight of five-lined paper. Teaching music on this island was going to be the sort of opportunity I probably would not see again.
And so, with that moment of slight indecision, I ended up being the music teacher at St Cecilia’s. Of course, it still needed to be approved by the school, time was still needed to be made for me, and certain elements needed to be smoothed over. But by the beginning of last week it was settled that, at the start of the new quarter than began after Easter, I would teach eight grade music. And so I spent the week planning. And in order to plan, I had to actually find music.
I began by asking one of the nuns. I have had a life-long respect for nuns, they have an odd way of knowing exactly what is going on. It’s probably one of the perks of being married to the creator of the universe. I approached an old Chuukese nun who seemed to run a large proportion of the school’s affairs from a table in the teacher’s lounge. She opened up a room next to the teacher’s lounge that was dark and musty. As my eyes grew focussed to the light, I saw that the entire room was filled with books. It looked like the mother of all garage sales. She propped the door open with a piece of wood to let the light in and left me to my own devices.
It became clear to me that the entire contents of the room were donated to the school. Some of these boxes were even marked by the group that donated them, mostly community groups or other schools in America. It was very clear from the outset, however, that most of these donations were a failed venture. Whilst there were some extremely useful looking piles of textbooks the majority were clearly donated without any sense that these books were destined for a small Elementary and Middle school in the middle of the Pacific. As I looked further and further, I started to develop a list of favourites in my mind. They included...
> How to Program Your Atari Computer (circa 1980)
> How to Make Money in Local Real Estate
> The History of the American Negro (circa 1970)
> The Christian Approach to Sexual Education (circa 1972)
> A variety of ‘shock fiction’ novels from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s (with tag-lines such as ‘I am your regular all-American girl next door, addicted to alcohol at seventeen’)
And my personal favourite, a music teaching program on vinyl records.
Despite spending a day foraging in the twilight of that room, I was only gifted with a series of music textbooks for a program clearly designed to get children to hate the subject of music. I spent the next day working through the music shelf in the library. The contents of the shelf were...
> SEVEN books of hymns
> One book of nursery rhymes (circa 1962)
> One outdated music textbook (circa 1973)
> One biography of David Bowie
I made a bet with myself that I would go through all of the books and leave the Bowie biography as a treat at the end. I began with the music textbook from the seventies. I am afraid that you readers will never be able to appreciate the book in the flesh, but to give you an idea, think interracial preteens in matching sweaters representing time signatures. Oh yeah. The highlight was a double page collage of pictures entitled ‘The Music Teacher’ wherein a middle aged man with mutton chops in a suede suit and a paisley shirt undertook various activities with teenagers dressed in the fashion of the day in what was then considered music class. I showed Caroline this and said that this was exactly the kind of music teacher I wanted to be. She told me that while she would be impressed if I could grow the mutton chops, western culture had already messed up the island enough without tan suits and paisley shirts.
I only made it half-way through the first hymn book. It blew my mind. I had previously believed that Anglicans had consistently the most boring hymns of all the Christian churches. The Anglican hymnbook is nothing compared to the mind-numbing blandness of the Mormon Church’s hymns. If I had to endure that once a week I would demand multiple wives. I gave up on the book of nursery rhymes when I realised that a song entitled ‘America’ had directly stolen its tune from ‘God Save the Queen’ (the anthem not the Sex Pistols song). I was so disgusted that I refused to read it any more. I spent the rest of the day reading the David Bowie biography to make myself feel better.
The third day called for the final frontier. It was a room next to the library, they called it the Resource Room. It was perhaps more aptly described as the ‘dump everything that looks vaguely useful’ room. I asked the nun for the key. She handed it to me, looked me in the eye and said simply, “Good Luck”
Oh how I looked.
I looked until it hurt to look anymore.
I levelled mountains of miscellaneous textbooks. I searched caverns of teacher’s guides to every possible form of mathematics humanity is yet to discover. I saw the word literacy so many times I felt unwell. At last, my eyes fell upon a box, the binding was fading. It read...
Music...
Of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
“Bloody Mormons” I shouted to myself, “there aren’t even any of you on this island anyway.”
And I collapsed in frustration behind a pyramid if textbooks.
I woke up at lunchtime. It’s actually quite hard to tell when it’s lunchtime because the younger years seem to run around playing no matter what time of day it is. But
when I spotted my eighth graders outside I knew for certain that it was. I gained my composure and walked across the room to the door, preparing to spend a good half an hour eating a peanut butter sandwich, talking to a couple of students and generally feeling sorry for myself. I turned the knob, pressed against the door, and realised to my upmost dismay that I had been padlocked inside the resource room.
My first thought was “who would actually want to padlock this room? What are they afraid of? Are the Mormons going to come and steal back their mass books? Is there anybody on this island who would actually want to read about basic algebra so badly that they would steal from a school?” After this series of rhetorical questions passed my mind, I then realised, with a touch of horror that I could actually be here for a very long time. I had not seen anyone else enter the room the entire time I have been working at the school. If there was any form of campus security then that was the first I knew about it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to spend only one day before anyone would check the room, I would have to rely on someone noticing me missing and I had only been on the island for two weeks, that wasn’t exactly guaranteed.
Rather than resigning myself to this fate, I went up to the window to see which of my students I could possibly contact to get me out of here. Outside I noticed a particularly amiable eighth grader named Ratul. Ratul was a plump little guy with an odd haircut and a stupid smile that never seemed to leave his face. He said “yeah man” in an almost identical manner to a friend of mine from high school and we’d already created a secret handshake. I decided he was a pretty safe bet to get help.
“Hey Ratul!” I shouted a little bit pathetically out the window.
“Mr Joe? ”
“Hey Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room. Go tell Ms Caroline I’m here.”
“Yeah man.”
Ratul ran off, presumably to find Ms Caroline. I waited several minutes to be rescued, but there was no sign of either of them. I later found out that this delay was due to my accent, for what Ratul had heard was “Her Ratul, I’m stuck in the resource room, DON’T tell Ms Caroline I’m here.” He ran off, quite happy to follow my orders but a little puzzled as to the bizarre variation of hide and seek we were playing. This, however, got me no closer to rescue.
It was Jerry, a local Chuukese teacher who also taught eighth grade that eventually found me. He was walking into the library when I pleaded to him. “Jerry, Jerry, I’m stuck, get me out.” Whilst about equally bemused as Ratul before him, he pulled out his keys and gladly freed me from the educational Bastille I had been stuck in. And as I walked into the fresh smell of outside, I thanked him for his efforts and shelved my plans for a battering ram made out of Mormon hymnbooks. And I was a little more determined to teach music at St Cecilia’s.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
The Seven Year Itch
By far the greatest moment of my first week at Xavier was the moment I was given the keys to my office. This moment did not occur on the first day of my time here and in fact only occurred about four days in. It started with Father Martin’s entry into the faculty staff lounge. The faculty staff lounge, despite the term faculty staff lounge, is really just used by the American volunteers and us Australians. The Jesuits, bar one or two of the younger novices, rarely if ever make any appearances there. The Principal walking in meant that something big was about to happen.
At this stage, the occupants of the lounge were indulging in what seems to be the primary activity of the volunteers here, playing annoyingly simple games whilst waiting for the hideously slow internet to load. At the time, the game that was in vogue was called ‘Super Text Twist’, which involved forming as many words out of a certain sequence of letters as humanly possible. The fiery passion with which this was played had astounded me upon first arrival. Randy, my fellow Australian who hails from Riverview, had a particular aptness for the game and at the time of Martin’s arrival was furiously typing into the computer as the clock in the bottom right hand of the screen approached zero. When it did, Randy snapped back his head in disappointment and became immediately aware of Father Martin’s presence.
The priest held up a set of keys. Randy smiled, as if this entire conversation had progressed telepathically. He stood up immediately and looked at me. I had to come to. And wordlessly the three of us exited the lounge and began walking down the hall.
We walked into a section of the school that I had never entered before, where the walls seemed thicker and with no windows letting in any natural light. I later found out that when the power goes out (which is a daily occurrence) that this section of the school is pitch black, even in the middle of the day. The school is a converted Japanese signal station, and such quirks are rife throughout the building. It is, for interest’s sake, completely bombproof, a point highlighted as we walked through a metal door about as thick as I am. The priest stopped at an innocuous wooden door, turned to look at both of us, and inserted the oldest, brownest key into the doorknob. He smiled, and turned.
As he opened the door and watched our eyes widened, he simply said “Boys, your office.”
It was gigantic upon first sight, the white walls and green tiled floors seemed to extend into an absurd gargantuacity that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was twice the size of any of the other volunteer’s offices, which we had envied while we had stuffed our work into the corners of the teacher’s lounge. It had a row of book cases, with one shelf full of missals but the rest empty for us to place our books that we had brought from home (between the two of us we have quite a considerable collection). There was a window overlooking the school’s lawn that bathed the whole office in beautiful natural light. And best of all, two antique desks in the far corner of the room. After a quick round of scissors, paper rock to decide who would get the larger one (Randy won) we sat back behind them and contemplated the satisfaction of calling this office ours.
We made plans immediately. There was a fridge, we would have drinks. There was enough room for dancing, we need a disco ball. If we could hook up a sound system... oh the possibilities. We told Sami, the chief partier of the faculty, about our new office.
“Ah yes, that was the party room.”
And with a strangely poetic look into the distance he followed up.
“The parties will return to that room.”
This was the high point of the week. The low point was what followed quite quickly as we returned to the faculty lounge to report back what we had seen. We described the size, the light, the parties, the location, everything. We were babbling almost incoherently. At this point Lydia, one of the Americans who taught literature (and had a passion for Sylvia Plath which gave TJ and I no end of pleasure) turned to us and broke our poor little hearts.
“Oh that room, I know that room, that’s the scabies room.”
Of all the things you don’t want your room to be called, the ‘scabies room’ must place around the bottom of that list.
“When a kid in the dorm had scabies we had to put him in isolation. And we put him in that room.
“Are scabies infectious?”
“Incredibly.”
This all seemed to convenient to be true. However, the Americans have a generally limited capacity in understanding straight-faced humour. Tom had reported to me that you have to go “Jokes” every time you employ sarcasm otherwise they just think you’re weird. I then asked Sam, a burly Math teacher who was also dorm moderator, about the room.
“Oh yeah, the scabies room. You should be alright though, Scabies is only infectious for up to four months.
“When was the kid in isolation?”
“December.”
After that, the room lost some of its shine. We worked there, but we didn’t move much stuff in.
I checked scabies on Wikipedia. It seems pretty nasty. The article told me that the symptoms of scabies (known as the seven year itch) take two to six weeks to show after infection. It then had a picture of a Norwegian AIDS patient with scabies that almost made me vomit.
So I guess I’ll just have to wait 2-6 weeks.
And I’ve switched to medicated soap.
At this stage, the occupants of the lounge were indulging in what seems to be the primary activity of the volunteers here, playing annoyingly simple games whilst waiting for the hideously slow internet to load. At the time, the game that was in vogue was called ‘Super Text Twist’, which involved forming as many words out of a certain sequence of letters as humanly possible. The fiery passion with which this was played had astounded me upon first arrival. Randy, my fellow Australian who hails from Riverview, had a particular aptness for the game and at the time of Martin’s arrival was furiously typing into the computer as the clock in the bottom right hand of the screen approached zero. When it did, Randy snapped back his head in disappointment and became immediately aware of Father Martin’s presence.
The priest held up a set of keys. Randy smiled, as if this entire conversation had progressed telepathically. He stood up immediately and looked at me. I had to come to. And wordlessly the three of us exited the lounge and began walking down the hall.
We walked into a section of the school that I had never entered before, where the walls seemed thicker and with no windows letting in any natural light. I later found out that when the power goes out (which is a daily occurrence) that this section of the school is pitch black, even in the middle of the day. The school is a converted Japanese signal station, and such quirks are rife throughout the building. It is, for interest’s sake, completely bombproof, a point highlighted as we walked through a metal door about as thick as I am. The priest stopped at an innocuous wooden door, turned to look at both of us, and inserted the oldest, brownest key into the doorknob. He smiled, and turned.
As he opened the door and watched our eyes widened, he simply said “Boys, your office.”
It was gigantic upon first sight, the white walls and green tiled floors seemed to extend into an absurd gargantuacity that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. It was twice the size of any of the other volunteer’s offices, which we had envied while we had stuffed our work into the corners of the teacher’s lounge. It had a row of book cases, with one shelf full of missals but the rest empty for us to place our books that we had brought from home (between the two of us we have quite a considerable collection). There was a window overlooking the school’s lawn that bathed the whole office in beautiful natural light. And best of all, two antique desks in the far corner of the room. After a quick round of scissors, paper rock to decide who would get the larger one (Randy won) we sat back behind them and contemplated the satisfaction of calling this office ours.
We made plans immediately. There was a fridge, we would have drinks. There was enough room for dancing, we need a disco ball. If we could hook up a sound system... oh the possibilities. We told Sami, the chief partier of the faculty, about our new office.
“Ah yes, that was the party room.”
And with a strangely poetic look into the distance he followed up.
“The parties will return to that room.”
This was the high point of the week. The low point was what followed quite quickly as we returned to the faculty lounge to report back what we had seen. We described the size, the light, the parties, the location, everything. We were babbling almost incoherently. At this point Lydia, one of the Americans who taught literature (and had a passion for Sylvia Plath which gave TJ and I no end of pleasure) turned to us and broke our poor little hearts.
“Oh that room, I know that room, that’s the scabies room.”
Of all the things you don’t want your room to be called, the ‘scabies room’ must place around the bottom of that list.
“When a kid in the dorm had scabies we had to put him in isolation. And we put him in that room.
“Are scabies infectious?”
“Incredibly.”
This all seemed to convenient to be true. However, the Americans have a generally limited capacity in understanding straight-faced humour. Tom had reported to me that you have to go “Jokes” every time you employ sarcasm otherwise they just think you’re weird. I then asked Sam, a burly Math teacher who was also dorm moderator, about the room.
“Oh yeah, the scabies room. You should be alright though, Scabies is only infectious for up to four months.
“When was the kid in isolation?”
“December.”
After that, the room lost some of its shine. We worked there, but we didn’t move much stuff in.
I checked scabies on Wikipedia. It seems pretty nasty. The article told me that the symptoms of scabies (known as the seven year itch) take two to six weeks to show after infection. It then had a picture of a Norwegian AIDS patient with scabies that almost made me vomit.
So I guess I’ll just have to wait 2-6 weeks.
And I’ve switched to medicated soap.
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