Opportunity Knocks

“One of the stories I tell myself when I am trying to fall asleep is that I have tried.  I’ve tagged along after myself in the pages of my own modern Western, and every few years is another chapter in the story.  The myth of the cowboy.  I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth.  Yet I find myself falling for it again and again.  I am guilty of adding to the romance, of overlooking the tiny deaths that make the life so hard.”
-Tom Groneberg, “The Secret Life of Cowboys” 

We’re balanced right on the edge of the rainy season here in Sri Lanka. Showers come and go for short intervals unannounced and largely unheeded by the people who live here. My room is situated on the side of the house opposite the water, facing the considerably less attractive evidence of human inhabitation. Stray dogs pick through the trash that lines the street. The dilapidated walls of houses are made to look even less hospitable thanks to layers of grime and pollution. I’ve never seen anyone inside the building across from me. It looks uninhabitable by most standards, though, like many of the housing complexes around here, I imagine it is not regarded as such by would-be tenants. But it beats sleeping in the rain, I reckon.  There is one, lone chair on the roof of that building.  Day and night, rain or shine.  I wonder how it got there and why it remains; who sat in it or who intends to.  What they wish about when they stare into the sky, all alone in that chair, so temporarily removed from the garbage and barking and smog.  Maybe they don’t look at the sky at all…maybe they just sit there-out of the mess, but smart enough not to become trapped by the lure of an impossible dream.  Then again, like I said, nobody ever seems to sit there.

When I woke up this morning, I knew it had rained last night, because there was water in the hallway, seeping under the doors on the opposite side.  Rain only comes in through the window on the ocean side.  So maybe my view isn’t that bad after all.  Every morning is a carbon copy of the morning before:  my alarm goes off at 6am, and me being the only one to have an alarm, I stumble half asleep out of my room and knock heavily on Melissa’s door (I don’t like wasting time doing several, polite ‘wakey, wakey’ taps), then further down the hall to mike’s door, waiting each time for some verbal confirmation of life within.  Then it’s back to my room for a has-yet-to-be-refreshing cold shower.  After breakfast, we’re driven to school.

First thing every morning, the children are assembled on the grounds to hear announcements and sing the national anthem.  Their voices drift up through the trees, beyond themselves, past the three-walled classroom where they reach my ears as I sit in the empty space cluttered with too many old, wooden desks; planning the day’s lesson, waiting for them.  From that point on, the day goes either surprisingly well, or I am broken completely and contemplating desertion.  I teach five sections of 10th grade english–each class with their own charms and/or Children of the Corn.  Between classes, I sit in an open foyer facing the main lawn.  I used to like sitting on the lawn itself, but I have apparently managed to violently displease the crows here, which attack me and me alone when I enter their territory.  They let everyone else be: Melissa, Mike, the elderly, the children who seek to destroy their nests–but for whatever reason, they go absolutely Hitchcock when I’m around, swooping down and pecking me on the head.  There is one crow in particular who I believe is actually insane, and I wait patiently for that one opportune moment when no students are watching, when we may proceed to throw down.  I’m no advocate of cruelty to animals, but I will destroy this bird.  Its day is neigh.  After school, we stay for another two hours, tutoring students who need extra help.  Then it’s back to the Provincial House. 

The house itself begs for a more in depth description.  I’ve just walked out of the little computer room in search of someone who can tell me more about it–I wanted to hear the actual history, that it might bring to life all the shadows and creaks; some corroboration with the general sense I get that this place has a story all it’s own.  As soon as I walk into the hall, I see Brother Ignatius tutoring one of the girls who comes up to the house every day from the beach.  The kids who live in the villages down there are marginalized by public schools, Br. Ignatius tells me, and their families are too poor to send them to private schools, so the Brothers started a program here where they can come for free and get a good education.  And by ‘good education’, I actually mean, ‘qualify for Mensa’.  There is a small group of girls who are here working quietly when we leave in the morning, and are still hunched over their notebooks, scribbling away when we go upstairs to bed.  They are relentless.  Brother tells me that not so long ago, “ladies would not have even been invited here, but of course, things have changed.”  The house was built over 80 years ago, on land bought from a Dutch company, previously owned by a Portuguese planter.  The only vestiges remaining from that time now are a low, arched parapet running along the edge of the hill overlooking the ocean and a small stone elephant guarding one of the five entrances to the covered veranda.  There, in the main house, are a few small rooms used as classrooms, libraries, a kitchen, and one temporary computer lab.  Further down, the main house connects via sheltered garden area to the Brothers’ quarters. 

 When you first enter the gate, you are confronted with a well looked after lawn serving as a sort of landscaping drum roll announcing the chapel on the other side.  Sitting on a site which was once a Portuguese dance hall, the church sits patiently waiting to fill its occupant capacity, though it’s been a good 50 years since it’s had the chance.  Br. Ignatius estimates that at least 130 Brothers lived here then, alongside a number of young men who boarded here while they trained to become Brothers themselves.  These days, there are less than 30 Brothers who live here, plus the three of us.  “Lots of space”, I quip optimistically.

Although some might see this period of scant occupation of the house as a dark time, I certainly enjoy it in my own selfish, incurable romanticism for all things potentially haunted.  I love walking around at night, hearing the harmonized hum of an outdoor insect orchestra, my mind filling with thoughts and moments, just as the halls are saturated with the ghosts of Sunday Masses past.  Solemn, quiet but for the occasional thud of the as yet unidentified creature(s) in the attic, the house stands as much a supernatural mystery as it is a testament to stability, protection, and above all, the ability of the things we create to outlast their architects.

We spend most of our time after school here.  There are benches along a break in the parapet which easily lend themselves to extended moments of introspection at any time of day.  There’s a sizable shipwrecked boat that the people living in the village have brought closer to the shore and stripped for any valuable materials or sheet metal they could use to bolster their vulnerable seaside homes.  During the day there’s a cool breeze, the rustle of palm.  The sunlight warms your face and carries the peaceful feeling from where you are sitting out over the ocean; brings it back to the sun, connects something in your soul with the rhythm of the day, slowing as the sun sets over the water.  For a brief moment as it retreats from orange into blue, everything is frozen in place, distance becomes nothing, smoke and mirrors, it isn’t real.

Of course we’ve seen more than this in our time here, but I truly was not expecting to spend so much time talking about the atmosphere in which our little stories take place.  And now it’s getting pretty late.  Wednesday’s over, and that’s fortunate, but there’s still two more days to go before our impending 3 day weekend, so I’m going to head upstairs for some shut eye.  I’ll do another blog soon about the particulars of our experience.  Until then, cheers.

Tags: Sri Lanka, teaching abroad, Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 13:53 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.