Because Just When You Think You Know What It Is, It's...

January 26, 2009

Chinese New Year

Today was not a holiday off for school. The other English school made it a teacher work day before the start of their second semester. Not us. We had school without the Chinese today. Well, oddly enough the majority of absences did not seem to be Chinese students. Especially those in the higher grades. Couldn't sleep well last night because of all the firecrackers going off around the building. We have several Chinese neighbors.

Another strange element added to my day--I lopped all my hair off over the weekend, so everyone gave me oddly irripressible grins throughout the day.

Went to get a slip for checking my hemoglobin level tomorrow. Here, I have to go to a different place to have blood taken, and then go back to the doctor's office later on for the results. The doctor looked at my charts from the hospital and I think they were something like 6.6 at one point, which was dangerously low. He said that there has since been a wave of dengue cases in the city of which I was one of the first. Yippee!

Rainy weather continues. Reading A Cricket in Time Square in my free time and learning some new crochet stitches.

Suriname , marking my days | By cw | 9:11 PM

November 16, 2008

Shakespeare on mental health care

I actually looked forward to reading Macbeth with the seniors this year rather than dreading it, as I did last year. Even though I know they didn't comprehend a word they read and looked up the synopsis on-line, making them practice and perform scenes from the play is slowly acclimating them to the language of Shakespeare. This is one of my favorite selections taken from the end of Act V, scene II, when Macbeth asks the doctor about his wife's condition...

I think the irony of Macbeth's words have been lost for the most part on his modern day readers. Having studied psychology as part of my major in college, I do not discredit the progress we've made since Shakespeare's day in our understanding of human emotions and their outworkings. But even when writing my senior thesis paper on psychoanalysis, I kept a card with Jeremiah 17:9 on my desk to keep things in perspective:

"The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"

At times, it seemed rather pointless to wade through the flood of unproven theories about the causes of certain psychological disorders and even more frustrating to sort out the tangle of treatments. Then a year after graduating, I spent a few months working for an optometrist/vision therapist. A saying he often used was, "It's not as much the things you don't know, as the things you think you know already that get you into trouble." However, a doctor honestly admitting what he does not know often opens the door to competition of those who at least claim to know. But then ignorant doctors abound as much as bluffing ones, so who's to say what a doctor can and can't know? I'm not suggesting we make medical school into the next state funded "now-everyone-gets-to-go!" ordeal, but this continues to be a quandary for me. I at least think people should be able to call a doctor on his bluff when something is beyond his professional ken.

Macbeth's response to the doctor's inability to cure his wife's ailing heart?

"Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it."

A note on my personal state of health--I've felt back to normal for the past couple of weeks. So I've started back with my regular after-school tutoring schedule, which has been going fine. Looking forward to being home in a month for Christmas! Hope to see as many people as I can and thank you in person for all of your prayers.

| By cw | 4:42 PM

October 19, 2008

My stay at St. Vincent's Hospital

It all started last week when I was out for the entire weekend with a flu. The first quarter of school had just ended and I had a huge stack of tests to grade, but barely got through any of them by the time Monday came around. I decided to go to school and just assign homework for all my classes in order to have time to finish grading for report cards. Well, I didn't even make it to the first bell when I started to experience some severe abdominal pains. I thought it could have something to do with not having eaten much in two days. I started to feel a little weird when I was trying to open the bathroom door, and couldn't get the key to fit in either way I turned it. So I headed back to the office to ask for help, when I hit my head on the door and dropped the key on the ground. Fareza, heard the noise, and went to see what happened. So she caught me from hitting the ground and yelled for Lance to come help get me up. They decided to take me upstairs while someone called to make an appointent with the doctor.

Well, as soon as we stepped outside, my vision gave out. Lance and Fareza were wondering why I had my eyes wide open but was walking in the wrong direction. "I can't see!" So, they sat me down at the foot of the stairs and Auntie Joyce brought me something to drink. My vision came back once I sat down, and I was surrounded by the elementary teachers bickering over what should be done with me.

Fareza, Alney, and Mr. Gomes drove with me to the doctor, and Fareza stayed with me through everything there, since I was in a bit too much pain to manage on my own. Dr. Williams said it could either be appendicitis or an infection causing the inflammation, so he wrote me recommendation for more tests at the hospital. So Fareza called Mr. Hamid to tell him to come. He drove us back to school, and his wife Nirmala came along with us to St. Vincent's so that Fareza could go back to teaching her class for the day.

The surgeon also looked at me, and said he doubted it was appendicitis, but more likely that I had dengue fevor, which is a tropical virus carried by certain mosquitoes. They ran some blood tests, xrays (during which I almost fainted again), an ultrasound (which I really didn't like since the doctor kept telling me to relax while pressing down on the place that hurt the most.) Although Mr. H. had to go back to school, Nirmala stayed with me through everything holding my hand and making sure I didn't feel alone. Greg also came. Finally, I got a bed to lie in and then Greg and Nirmala left to go get my stuff from home.

Even though I was quite sick, every day I was expecting to be let out, but every day, they just took more blood tests without telling me what was going on, other than that appedicitis had been ruled out. I didn't even see the doctor of the ward I was staying in until Friday morning. (I had been there since Monday). He said that it was in fact a severe form of dengue, and that the blood tests showed that my blood platelets had been steadily dropping to a dangerous level, so there was no chance of my going home yet. However, they were hoping that the next tests would show the worst was over. Sure enough, that day I broke out into a rash which is the final stage of dengue. They moved me to my own room in another wing of the hospital so that I could have a doctor to check on me more than once a week, (I had been staying in a room of six beds with all Dutch speaking women--interesting time communicating with them).

Athough the room I was moved to was much cooler, on the second floor with a ceiling fan, I was so uncomfortable with the itching rash that I couldn't lay still for five seconds together. So my last night there was not a very comfortable one. Then the next day, the doctor came to check on me, and said that the tests were showing a rise in my blood platelets, and that I could finally go home!

Although I'm still pretty fatugued, and may be for a while yet, I'm so relieved to be out of the hospital. I was even able to go to church today. Thank you if you've been praying for me through all of this. It hasn't been much fun, but I've been very blessed to have the FPC family here to take care of me as one of their own. I've had visitors every day, friends to bring by anything I need, people grading all my papers, filling in report cards, teaching classes on top of their own full schedules, and now that I'm home, I've had meals brought for me and so many friends willing to do whatever they can to help. It's more than I could ever have asked for, and I am so grateful.

| By cw | 2:39 PM

October 3, 2008

friend and foe

Funny incident in the seventh grade today. We have been reading a unit on stories about animals. So the seventh graders have decided that any animal intruders (moths, spiders, etc.) on our classroom should be treated as friends and by no means killed. Well, today they overturned that decision when a big wasp entered in through the door. He wandered to the front of the room where one of the boys pelted him with a notepad. It missed, by a lot, but changed the course of the wasp's meandering flight to the back of the room followed by a wave of ducking heads, swinging arms, and upraised textbooks. He eventually ambled back in my direction, inciting the same haphazard flight of Frank's homework. Then just as I thought this frenzy had become truly pointless, the wasp took yet another turn about the room. At this point, the very boy who had the class chanting "Animals are our friends!" days before, suddenly stood up with a ruler in his hand and a gleam in his eye. He swatted once. The tension was thick. Twice! A girl ran screaming outside the classroom. He swatted a third time. Then there was a long pause. The ruler had indeed taken the wasp down.

I

marking my days , school | By cw | 6:31 PM

September 28, 2008

lesson in kitsch

Just finished reading a book that discusses the meaning of kitsch in a way I've never really thought about it. Kitsch is a presentation of the world without banality. The author claims that although one can identify things that are kitsch, they cannot totally do without them. I resented this claim at first, thinking of all the people that I've looked down my nose at for their poor artistic sensibilities, so intrinsically tainted by kitsch. And then, last night I got to see a re-run of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, which I had been so sad to miss when school first started. I was amazed by the optical feats of the costumed masses in the arena. It wasn't until Sarah Brightman started singing about the brotherhood of man while standing on top of a world globe that it hit me in the eye. I had been enraptured in that moment by total kitsch. Well, it wasn't just the book that brought about this realization. I had also been reading several news summaries written by students about the powdered milk scare in China. The recall of products containing melamine had been put off so as not to hamper China's reputation during the Olympic events. However, when one realizes kitsch as a lie, it can still be something enjoyable in and of itself. The spectacle of a woman in white singing atop a giant globe is pretty entertaining, even if it does not move one to believe in the possibility of world peace.

delving into the DEEP | By cw | 7:58 PM

September 10, 2008

legalization and personification

Left school during chapel today to get my visa extended until February, which I always forget to do a month after I've been in the country. In fact, I wouldn't have remembered it still if LV hadn't mentioned yesterday that we were four days past the deadline. Well, it turned out to be a quick and painless ordeal. GK drove me down to the police station, which has always been an interesting place to me. There are a few people with a table set up outside the entrance selling fruit and flavoring essences. Today the produce looked fresher than usual. Inside, we talked to a different woman from the stone-faced uniformed one. This woman looked large and pleasant, wearing a cotton plaid shirt. However, on her desk, the same bouquet of tiny fake roses stuck out of a cup in their customary lopsided way. Each year, more of the white Styrofoam shows through the red felt blossoms.

Seventh grade corrected their friendly letters in class. One of them wrote a letter to me to say that he hoped Miss would attend his graduation on May 2. It took longer than I would have imagined necessary to explain that he shouldn't write to someone about herself in the third person. Finally, I started talking to him in the third person. "HL needs to rewrite his friendly letter to me." And then he got it.

The longer I teach, the more I realize that no matter how long I take to explain an assignment, there will always be someone who doesn't get it...even if they try. I have been assigning some of the same writing assignments from last year, including a poem using personification in the ninth grade. One of the girls who is repeating the grade wrote something that made so little sense last year that I thought about publishing it on here, but somehow didn't get around to it. Maybe I felt conscience stricken.

Anyway, several of the students brought their little crinkled compositions for me to look over after the grammar test, and she was one of the last.

It began, "Honesty is something that can set a person free."

Good beginning, I thought, and then glanced through the remainder to find no stitch of personification anywhere else.

Another student began, "Love is like an angel."

Again, not quite.

Another, "The truth is like an angel leading people to the light."

What is it with angelification?

And another, "The wind is strong like a bull."

Well, you get the idea. Personification is not as easy a concept to grasp as I had supposed.

| By cw | 2:25 PM