Found In Ceylon

Adorable Damnation Puppies

So yesterday, I’m reviewing one of my students’ government-issued English textbooks and find this phrase in one of the graphics: “Damnation puppies! Adorable, for sale.”

But I’m just being picky. The English textbook is actually not too bad–it is replete with vibrant colors and innovative exercises. It just goes way over the heads of any Rohana student. Never mind about that.

School started last Tuesday, 2 January. Two kids showed up: Pasan and Ishara. I wasn’t too thrilled because I was hoping to treat Liz to the sight of a bustling deaf institute, not a showing of To Sir, With Love to kick off a teacher’s discussion. Of course, it didn’t help that the 3rd was a poya full moon holiday, which leads me to just wonder what was going through the Ministry of Education’s minds when they arranged the 2007 academic calendar.

It wasn’t much brighter the following Friday when the total number of students present finally broke into the double digits only because two of the day students decided to come…after school.

About half of the students returned by last Monday, 8 January, and now I think we’re at 75% capacity seven school days after the term began.

Actual classroom instruction has yet to reach the secondary department because we’re all trying to figure out a new system of arranging our classrooms. For time immemorial, the second floor had been divided by four-foot-tall partitions into grade-based rooms - Grade 6A, 6B, 7A, 7B…11A and 11B. The students would sit tight through all eight periods while the teachers (i.e. the Sinhala teacher, the science teacher) rotated among the classrooms.

Now we’re opting for a subject-based arrangement–a Sinhala room, a Maths room, a science room, a Buddhism room, and so on. This has presented interesting challenges because now every classroom has to be able to accommodate the largest class (as of press time, it was 7B with nine students but that is likely going to change). We do not have enough desks to accomplish this, nor do we have enough blackboards or teachers’ desks for the increased number of classrooms overall. Extras have been ordered and should come sometime this following three-day holiday weekend (Monday is Tamil Thai Pogal Day).

I have been assured that normal education will start again next Tuesday the 16th. Yeah, right.

Jill and Peter, two volunteers who devoted one year of their lives to the renovation of the Rohana Special School, are returning that very day, and I am reminded of this august occassion daily. The children have gotten so excited that I had to squash rumors that Sophie was also joining them or that they were coming back to stay for another year. I, for one, cannot wait to meet those two obviously wonderful persons.

Sadly, it’ll be just for half a day because I go up to Colombo that afternoon. No, I don’t love Colombo that much to visit it for the fifth time in as many weeks, but I’m catching a flight to Detroit of all places.

My cousin Harrison’s bar mitzvah is next week and I’ve made a point of not missing this one (or I won’t see another family one for at least fourteen years!). So I’ll be back on your hemisphere for a week, and then I return to Sri Lanka 25 January.

And I’ll stay put here in Matara until next June. This decision may have been taken lightly, but the truth is I feel like I haven’t been such a great teacher the last few months with my inexperience and the steep learning curve getting in the way. I’m looking forward to being a much more effective educator the next several months and really help the children make leaps in their English education (I truly believe that they will).

Four months in Sri Lanka really isn’t enough! I can’t wait to make this number turn into nine.

The children are, of course, delighted to hear that I’m staying, and tell me that I will absolutely love April and May which are chock-full of holidays. May, and the weeks leading up to Wesak Poya Day is like Christmas for the Sinhalese. Even the sign for May alludes to the string lights that blanket this island (for a few weeks I thought they meant fireflies, which sounded so cool).

I recently received a couple of letters and loved them so much (even the holiday card from my former employer) that I have posted my mailing address in the Contact Me page. Not a subtle hint, but the message does gets across, doesn’t it?

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