Gentle Reader,
It has been several days now without internet access, but the crew finally got it all working in our flat. We are now in Guiyang, our teaching site. There is a saying here in Guiyang, which is in Guizhou Province: " In Guizhou the sky is never three days clear, the land does not have three feet that are flat, and the people haven't three cents' worth of money..." This province is something akin to our Appalachia, with its wretched material poverty, its mountain beauty, and its amazing cultural richness.
We have had many adventures in the last few days, which I will write about tomorrow. I will also go back and tell you more about Guilin and our time there. However, tonight it is the teaching that is on my mind. Scott and I met our students for the first time today, after all the speech-making at the opening ceremony. And this is why we are truly here... to teach. As always, we will learn far more than we teach...
First Day Teaching in Guiyang
They asked me if my job
makes me happy
and I tell them of my twenty-nine years
of choice and freedom to teach
literature I love
and how I wake up wanting to see
my students
and how not all days
or hours are joy
but most are
most of the time.
And they tell me
of their unhappiness
how they are transferred
from primary to middle school
with no choice, no voice.
How thier students hate learning English
see no point in it
because some would remain forever on the farms
anyway.
And how they want to have their students
sing and dance
but can't get them out of their seats,
can't get them to sing along.
They refuse.
And how when the students
are "naughty" they would like
to slap or hit them
or kick them hard
but instead they make them write out
lists of words,
long, long lists.
And I didn't protest about
turning the joy of writing into misery
and punishment. I wanted to
open rivers of conversation
rather than dam the waters.
And then one teacher
tells of the happiness he gains
when he sees students graduate.
Another tells of feeling proud
of the good scores her students accomplish.
And then another tells
of her work with special children
at the blind school
and how she focuses on their oral learning
because they simply cannot see.
And then she tells of her mother being a teacher,
and how her mother is exactly my age
and how she herself is the age of my oldest daughter.
She stays after class, inviting me,
the foreigner,
to the blind school.
And I remember being a guest teacher
at the blind school in Nepal,
dancing with Ram, the blind boy
who could still see shadows,
on Tihar Festival Night.
"There will never be any space between us,
even when you are not here in Pokara, ever, "
he tells me, this boy who had always been
afriad to dance.
But talking to me now
is this ViVi,
seeing her mother in me.
And I am gentled by her eyes
that see so clearly,
daughter eyes wanting to know.
My world right now is here
in Guiyang.
I am mindfully present
and I realize
I am home.
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