April 11, 2012

Only three students showed up for the 8:00am class and I told the class monitor that I wasn’t there to do any tutoring and if an entire class was not available or interested, I’d be going back home. Her eyes widened in alarm and she got up from her seat in a flash and fled to the dean’s office. He came in, as unctuous as ever, and told her to mark all the students that were absent and just like he had done for the other class, a meeting would be called with their parents and they would be “punished”. By this time, I had nine students, half of the class and decided to proceed. For the second class, the teacher group, it was just about the same story. One of the students told me that a group of the teachers have been selected to go to Germany during the summer for an intensive English training workshop and they needed to go to the embassy to submit additional paperwork. We worked on identifying analogies, something they had never done before and which took them the entire period to complete.

The weather these days reminds a lot of Florida as we are having beautiful mornings, cool and clear, with great views of the mountains where the snowy peaks are receding slowly but surely. By mid-day though, the clouds move in and then we hear the thunder rumbling in the distance and rain is fast approaching by mid-afternoon. Today was a bit unusual in the fact that it continue to thunder and rain until the time I went to bed.

 

One thing about being spring and keeping the window open all day is that there seem to have been a mushrooming of kids around the building who must have been kept indoors all this time and now spend a considerable amount of time whining and crying below my window. I’m beginning to wonder if there might have been an upside to the terrible winter we just had.

I finished reading “Makeda”, but was a bit disappointed with the ending as the tension had built up to such an extreme that I really expected something much more gruesome to have happened to the protagonist. In spite of that, what a great writer! On reading his blurb on the inside cover of the book, I realized that he was the writer who was interviewed on NPR about two years ago after writing a searing account about Haiti. I need to write down the title of that book so I can get it once I’m Stateside.