Instalment 16; Is it me Who is Odd?:

 

I have been doing literacy workshops every afternoon. The mornings I spend walking from school to school in the sweltering heat delivering messages and convincing teachers to sign up for the certificate in early childhood through the university of the south pacific. I tell them if they enroll through the correspondence program, I will hold study groups and we will all do the work together in a class. I tell them I will help them with the assignments and translate their work from Bislama to English. So far I have four teachers. One of the 30 or so teachers has completed this certificate and so can call them selves ‘trained’. The problem is that the teachers don’t get paid, so if they train the school may fire them as they may have more ground to demand money for their work. I tell them teachers must work for their children’s future and the future of their country. Better teaching will help their children become tomorrows leaders, their country will have a brighter future. People like this sort of talk here and I’m becoming better at it. I get asked to make an impromptu speech at least once a meeting and I usually add something like that in.  Delivering messages is quite time consuming. As nobody has a phone and there are no postmen all messages must be delivered by hand or mouth. If you have a note or letter for someone you can ‘pass’ it. Passing a letter is just giving it to someone going in that direction, who will pass it to someone else until it finds the person. You must make sure the name is written clearly on. You can pass letters to remote parts of the island by standing on the road and flagging down a taxi going that way. They will pass it to the next taxi and so on until it reaches the village… at some point, usually well after it was needed. This is a reasonably good system but all the same, often people don’t get messages.

 

Anyway that’s my mornings. This week’s afternoon workshops are in Kamewa school. The school is right on the beach, the kindergarten just about in the sand. The walls and roof of the kindy are made completely with rusty corrugated iron, inside it is empty with a smooth concrete floor. I walk across the school field at lunch time through hundreds of laughing, topless, shoeless children in faded grey school shorts. They usually run after me for a bit shouting ‘hello missus’ and then return to the football. The school field is nicely mowed and lined in tall palm and pine trees. When I arrive at the kindy usually all the teachers (from five of the surrounding schools) are asleep on the concrete floor. The first day I was surprised to see the large women in flowery dresses scattered around, I lay down in the middle of them all and gazed out the window at the blue sea. I could actually see the heat like a clear mist. I woke up ten minutes later and the women were all sitting up looking at me, as though it was me who was odd. I am coming to terms with the fact that it is indeed me that is odd. I then say the welcome prayer, and somebody else says the closing prayer, I think this is because the closing prayer has to be really really long, and I can never think of enough things to thank god for, as much as I do try.