Post 11: Hit the Ground Running

It’s been a while. What can I say, I’ve been busy.

Coming into this entry, I thought about the fact that sometimes I feel like Gulliver here in Malaysia. No, I’m not comparing my blog to the brilliance of Jonathan Swift’s novel. I was mostly thinking about how I wake up in the middle of the night feeling pinned down by bites of angry insects and that I have often found ants crawling all over me and all over my apartment as if I’ve invaded their tiny world. Then again, I sometimes feel very, very small and lost in the big (but small) realm of Malaysia.

Since I last wrote, I enjoyed a wonderful two-week holiday with visiting family (my older sister, my mother and my father only, for, alas, my older brother could not make it); I also started school again. I have been immersed in training for choral speaking because, that’s right, my students are going to state; and I helped to lead my second English camp.

My students did not win district. No no, they are winners only by default. For whatever reason (probably he laziness that seems to permeates the Malaysian education system), all the other schools who had claimed to have choral speaking groups decided to withdraw. So here goes nothing! This Friday! Ah!

This Friday, I will leave with my 35 children (that’s right, I managed to wrangle 35 students to stay in choral speaking though many regularly inform me that they want to quit for a variety of reasons) to go to a nearby school in Bentong and compete with ten other schools for the state title. We are easily the underdogs of the competition and, to be frank, I don’t think we have a chance of winning. Do we have a chance of not being last place? I think so. I hope so. You see, all the other schools who are competing at this level are boarding schools. Boarding schools in Malaysia are the more elite schools. Not to mention, it’s about ten times easier to gather students for practice because they all live at the school. I, on the other hand, have to hope that my students feel inclined to find some mode of transportation to the school on any given day (except for now because our principal is making us practice during school hours. In other words, I’m not teaching my regular classes; I just teach chorals peaking practice for hours on end and sweat through a baju kurung doing it). Sorry for the long sentence.

To reward my students who have definitely been working hard and are tired of choral speaking, I am baking them peanut butter cookies at this moment. I’ve made enough so that each student can have, at least, two cookies (if they’re willing to eat the more burned ones). The baking process has been incredibly slow though. I can only bake nine cookies at a time. And the whole process of baking a batch and cleaning the tray and everything (I’m using sheets of foil to expedite the process) takes about fifteen minutes. You do the math as to how long this baking process has been taking.

As of today, there has been some sad news. I had heard the whispers of it over the past weekend where I was running around like a crazy person trying to organize 110 Form 1, 2, and 3 students with the help of eleven other ETAs. For now, yet another ETA is leaving Malaysia because of irreconcilable conflicts at her school. She is the third ETA who will be leaving the program though this if the first because of problems at school. One of the others was homesick beyond sanity and the other one had a severe enough concussion that returning to the States to be observed was necessary. No one ever expects these things to happen, but at the same time, one knows they do happen. As part of the fledgling expansion of the ETA program here, the school incident has a higher likelihood of happening. The previous two ETA departures were unfortunate and unexpected also, but this one with the ETA-school conflict is a little more frightening.

Needless to say, I haven’t been in a normal rhythm here since I last wrote which is the primary reason why I haven’t written. I’ve just had my nose to the grindstone trying to power through a cold, having a blast, raising morale, organizing games, and so on and so forth. Things will probably come to a crashing halt as Ramadan is right around the bend, but until then, I imagine that my activity schedule is going to be heavy.

I’m trying to keep this brief rather than exploding with all the cooped-up thoughts I have. I keep having to run away to check the oven and my little batches of cookies. I hope to write more in the coming days.

Rest assured, I am doing well. Life has its stress and strains, but I continue to be blessed with good people who really seem to care and genuinely appreciate my presence. My PPD (district education) officer told me today that I was “one of the success stories” which was a tremendous compliment though I still have four months to have unforeseen problems. Regardless, I look to the future with hope.