A New Post, A New Life

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I sit here on a blue-tiled porch, the pitters of rain on sand, leaves and rooftops all around me. Beside me come the tinks of a spoon stirring coffee and turnings of a page. The sky seems too light to be raining, but the air is fresh enough. It is a Sunday morning.

Weekend mornings have turned into laundry marathons because weekday mornings have turned from quiet laundry-and-oatmeal-filled sittings to sleeping-and-oatmeal-filled runnings. Maybe its just a phase. But either way, Saturday or Sunday morning is filled with soapy buckets and soap-filmed hands. It really is quite lovely also. The simplicity of hand-washed laundry in the morning, amoung the simplicity of many things, is one of the pleasures we are slowly sipping here. The relaxed pace and quiet little hamlet in which we live are more suitable to my tastes that the bustle and honk of Can Tho.




[Sitting on the stoop of the bathroom listening to music and doing laundry. This is the kitchen/sitting room corner of our one-room house. In the corner of the room is the kitchen cabinet designed by Grace and made from driftwood and fishing nets found on the beach.]



So that is my little life here for now. I have not yet begun my PiA post, that will begin at the end of October. For now, I am teaching full-time at a Learning Centre for children of Burmese migrant workers and refugees (through a wonderful NGO called Grassroots www.ghre.org). Grades 1 to 5 are quite different from the university students of yesteryear, but I enjoy it much more.

At first I was a little scittered about jumping to teaching kids, but have learnt a lot and am really liking it. I think part of the apprehension was because I had in my mind that if I wanted to teach in the long term I would want to do elementary school, which led to an odd anxiety of whether I could, in fact, do that. But luckily I am neither an anxious nor scittery person and, more importantly, I do like it. I still have much to learn about it all, but that will come. Of course, I don’t feel I would teach ESL in the long-term so some of my hesitancies would disappear when my students could understand things like the word “or”, or “Don’t repeat after me”. Luckily they do understand the subtleties of a raised eyebrow and a sidelong look and know to maybe sit back down instead of carrying on with the idea of jumping over the two rows of desks to pinch the arm of a friend.


[Another shot of our house. This is the bedroom corner of the house. The table beside the bed was designed by me and once again built from wood salvaged around. We have little saws on our pocketknives for doing the cutting.]

But I did have a funny moment with Grade 2 the other day:

Two days previous we had read an illustrated version of “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed” which went over with incredible pleasure, SO I decided we would learn to sing the song. After doing the initial run-through the day before, this day’s session went wonderfully. After finishing and having a bit of a free period of talking and students still spontaneously yelling “NO MORE MONKEYS JUMPING ON THE BED!” one of kids jumped on the table to run across to a friend. I looked at him, put a hand on my hip and a finger in the air (the action we do for that particular line) and said in my best doctor voice: “No more monkeys jumping on the table!!!”. He understood quite well, despite probably not knowing the word for table. I thought it quite funny, and surprisingly effective at remedying the situation.