April Fool's! My face isn't pretty at all.

To enter my school's campus from town you must go through a gate. Every morning the school captains man the gate to frisk arriving students for contraband junk food. Teachers, of course, are greeted warmly and allowed to pass through no questions ask. When I was going through on April 1st, a captain said, "Oh Madam, Madam, your bag is unzipped!" When I bent to investigate she said "April Fools!" and laughed heartily. I was so pleased. I didn't think that the celebration of April Fool's Day would have made it to Bhutan. It turns out it is here, and intensely here! On the other side of the gate an overwhelming barrage of April foolishness awaited me. "Madam, your kera is on backward!" "Madam, you're about to step in stool!" "Madam, there is someone come to see you just over there!" Every five seconds some student told me a plausible fib, shouted "April Fool's!", then collapsed in giggles. It was great.

My favourite thing on April Fool's Day, though, are genuine statements that sound like pranks. The fibs were frequently interspliced with, "Madam, something is wrong with your face!", which was true. I took a bit of a fall the other day in front of the bakery:

Then, in English class, someone whisphered, "Madam, there is a giant rat behind the dust bit." If that doesn't sound like a "Made you look!" prank, I don't know what does. But there she was:

She started running around the classroom. Girls lept on their desks while the boys tried to catch her. One did and we put her outside. It was moust exciting!

Happy April one and all! 

Not Just a Pretty Face

The day before yesterday I went to Trashiyangtse's premiere (et seule)
 beauty salon with two of the other lady teachers:

We had papaya facials!

I thought it would feel weird to have a stranger rub goo on me but it was really okay:

After that, I did the Asian thing and got my eyebrows threaded. It is a very quick process.

It hurts, but no more than plucking or waxing and it does a better job:

I think I looked lovely:

Yesterday, I came home to an inch of water on my kitchen floor. My water supply comes and goes and in the morning I'd turned the tap to check if there was any and, finding none, forgot to turn it back.

Do you know one thing that's harder than scooping up a kitchen swimming pool with a rubber boot? Photographing yourself scooping up a kitchen swimming pool with a rubber boot to appease your blog reading public!

I think the flood was an incredible blessing in disguise. I had been worried that I wouldn't be able to handle living on my own. By the time I finished booting, my floor was dry, my bucket was filled, and my worries were gone, replaced with the conviction that I am a clever, competant problem solver- not just a pretty face.

Midair Maths and a Marvellous Mistake

On the fourth week of maths club my teachers gave to me: four miles of line, three piles of rocks,

 two logic puzzles, and information on a dead genius!

Today in Maths club we made a giant number line. The students were each assigned an odd number and wrote it in the middle of a piece of paper. Then they taped their papers together in order and wrote the even numbers over the cracks. This ensured that all of the whole numbers were evenly spaced:

They eventually added halfs and negative integers:

The finished product was very, very long:

Then we jumped! I can only jump by 5's but some students can jump by 10's!

If you look closely at the above picture you will notice the biggest learning opprotunity (a.k.a. mistake) made during the creation of the line. The team assigned to making the negative integers originally made them in the order "-1, -2, -3..." rather than "-3, -2, -1...", etc. To affix them to the rest of the number line they had to realize their error and turn the whole negative part upside down. That is exactly the kind of productive negative experience that, taken as a challenge and approched creatively, leads to a rich understanding of concepts. I felt like I was inside my Philosophy of Education textbook!

House Standings

As promised, I intend to keep you up to date on my school's four houses as they compete against eachother in athletic and academic competitions...

Druk (Dragon) House is off to an early lead, having placed first in the Spelling Contest, first in the boy's football tournament, and second in the girl's football tournament.

Tak (Tiger) House is a close second. They placed first in the girl's football tournament and second in the boy's football tournament. 

Chung (there isn't any word for it in English: see picture above) House and Seng (Lion) House are currently tied in third. In each football tournament one placed third and the other came last but won "most sportsmanlike".

I have a soft spot in my heart for Seng House because their boys captain is the most diligent in his litter collection duty. I congratulated him once on the huge armful of waste he was bringing to the dustbin. His response was, "Principal Sir says captains should lead by example!"

William Heads Home

William left Trashiyangyse this morning at 5am. We realized that we both have to be where we fit. I belong in Bhutan teaching and loving it and soaking up the culture. He belongs in Bedford where he can see his friends, have a real job, and set aside some money for our future. We're going to miss eachother, of course, but the absence will only make our hearts grow fonder.

Dull sublunary lovers' love 
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit 
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
    The thing which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is, 
Inter-assurèd of the mind, 
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
    Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 
    Like gold to aery thinness beat.

- John Donne

This Developing Country

I see Bhutan developing all around me. I see non-material changes like the education system's switch from emphasizing memorization to promoting deep understanding. And I see material changes. Buildings and bridges and roads are being construction at an astounding rate:

Rarely, though, does my experience in Bhutan conform with what I thought it would be like to live in a "developing country." The term made me imagine squalor and desperation. My life in Trashiyangtse is, in almost every respect, as comfortable or more comfortable than my life in Canada. I have electricity, running water, and Internet reception most of the time. I feel safe in my home and in the streets. The children at my school seem adequately nourished, clothed, cared for, and supplied with what they need to learn.

To be sure, there is a lot less stuff here than in Canada. Children find entertainment without Nintendo DS's making jumbo legs with cardboard boxes or peeking in on the crazy Canadian woman:

And I have to find ways to teach without the learning materials I was accustomed to in Canada. Rocks, as it turns out, are a versatile resource perfect for division:

Only very rarely do I experience something that makes me go "whoah. I'm not in the first world anymore." Thursday brought two such moments, both related to public health. First, it was World Tuberculosis Day and the children were educated on the transmission, prevention, and symptoms of the disease. Before the presentation, I thought that tuberculosis was an historical problem that no one worried about anymore. In actual fact, one third of the global population is infected with tuberculosis mycobateria that will, if the immune system is compromised, become symptomatic. TB is especially dangerous, therefore, for adolescents, the elderly, and people with AIDS:

Second, I was tasked with giving my home class their deworming medication, a pill to chew and a pill to swallow which all students in Bhutan take several times a year to clear their systems of any intenstinal parasites they've picked up from unclean water or poor sanitation:

Mild side effects of the medication are common and include headaches and nausea. I now know what university professors feel like trying to lecture the morning after St. Patrick's Day.

My Dream Hovel

My first period classroom is on the very edge of the school campus and at the very edge of a steep hill. It overlooks a homestead where I've dwelled all my life. It is the quaint haven where my mind has gone in every moment of stress and sadness. There, in my peace place, a cluster of white prayer flags remember a good man who died too young and cast gentle shadows on a road lined with stone.

The house itself is just beyond the wall. The eclectic materials from which it's constructed make it seem almost tentative, temporary, and incomplete, but at the same time it is comfortable in itself, and wisely old. You know before you see them that the tenants will hobble along with bent backs, and smile with deep creases. Everything is as I dreamt it: the wood pile, the vegetable plots, the pink blossom Truffula trees, and occasional cats.

Yeats understood the appeal. "I will arise and go now, / And go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there, / Of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean rows will I have there, / A hive for the honey bee, / And I'll live alone in that bee loud glade. / And I shall have some peace there /..."

Only poetry has the words for it, my stone-walled hovel where a river spills and twists and gurgles. Yeats, but Wordsworth, too: "These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs / With a soft inland murmur.[...] These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts [...] These beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: / But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din / Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet..."