Dusty desperation

The school gate is a large stone edifice vaguely resembling an ancient tomb and stands as the singular entrance and exit to the school of some three thousand students and several hundred teachers. Guarded only by some metal grating and a grinning grandfather in military uniform sipping tea and squinting in the sun, it is in use nearly all day.

On one side of the gate resides the relative order and tranquility of a bustling teacher's college. On the other side all of the chaos, madness, filth, and darkness of city life teems.

On the other side of the gate, every day, three children sit, nearly obscured by dust. Looking as though they are perhaps made of dust. Dusty hair, dusty faces, dusty fingers, dust encrusted clothes... a painful reminder that our lives, filthy as they are, are perhaps little more than such dust.

The children dance around the school gate, they chase people, they beg for small money, they put their grubby hands in students' clean pockets, they sing, they hug their nearly empty cardboard box. They are tiny. They are desperate, they are despised, they are ignored, they are nearly trampled by the coming and going around the school gate. Their existence in such a state is proof of all the world's evil.

The oldest boy, a wise six years, grins when you catch his eye but when he doesn't know you're looking his expression betrays a grim hopelessness, eyes which should bear a spark yield only a void. Perhaps a mirror of his destiny. His name is Puchun.

He asks for money but has learned to take anything he's given. Especially from the strange pale one who gives him and his little sisters potatoes, drinks, candy, fruit, anything she has on hand except money... and she knows them, even when she has nothing she speaks to them. She has asked their names.

The dust swirls and settles etching patterns into their skin and turning their hair lighter. Puchun and the smallest sister hum and huddle together. The day is warm and the dust is thick. They are tired of calling out and hope that their presence is enough to persuade someone to empty their pockets into the busted cardboard box they carry. Then out of the sky they are handed two bottles of orange juice, bought just for them. Another dusty one materializes out of nowhere and the two orange juices already given out all that's left is a bottle of sprite. Quickly handed over as though it was bought just for her the third one squats next to the other two.

The giver of drinks turns to leave and feels a tug at her shirt. The last dusty one has followed her, has left a dirty hand print on her clothes. Through eyes of liquid surrounded by banks of dust she stares deep into the face of the pale stanger... mutters a deliberate "xie xie" and dashes back to the edge of the school gate to drink and be consumed by dust.

The gate stands and the students and teachers come and go. On the outside of the gate watermelon and popcorn sellers hawk their wares from rusty bicycles. The sun glitters and the trees green leaves wash the street with shade. The gate grandfather has stepped inside to take a nap. On the inside of the gate the school slumbers in afternoon repose. Clothes hang on the nearby bushes to dry. A teacher chats with some students before strolling back to her apartment.

And three little dusty ones live lives of quiet desperation on the other side.

The madness I love.

It's the student midterm speaking exams during which they all have an opportunity to tell me anything they want in simple past:
One time there was a girl I liked. I was washing my hands at the WC and she also came to wash her hands. So I plucked up my courage and said "you also have urine on your hands?" and she became angry.

It's the confessions that students make about the impact of my eating habits which would make my mother proud:
Ms. Kelly after I meet you my habit changed. Before I had bad style and I would always leave so much food. But after we eat together I understand I should not waste food, should always eat everything. Think about the beggars.

It's the ten o'clock at night phone call of riddles from a friend who is forever starting a new project and knows where great momo restaurants lurk throughout the city:
Kelly! I found a partner for my company, she has twenty percent of budget and I have eighty percent... now I have a question for you: what do I put on my business card?

It's the teacher who catches me laboriously coping Tibetan writing from a text book and sits too close to me on the bench and has no qualms about coughing in my face as he offers me advice:
Speak Tibetan.

It's the friend and self declared personal nutritionist who cannot help but to get up on her soapbox every time she sees me:
You never eat outside, you are hungry you come to my house. Even you come every day. I cook for you... other food is bad for your body. You must never not have health. Come tomorrow.

It's the student in the front row who leans forward mid activity to the teacher's desk just to inform me that:
Ms. Kelly you really are beautiful.

It's these things that frustrate me to the point of madness and yet manage to cause me to fall hopelessly in love with a people who battle horrid pronunciation just to tell a story in hopes of a laugh, who notice habits you have long forgotten you had, who call on a friend for absolutely anything, who force you to do what you long to do and feel totally inadequate doing, who treat you like a small child because they simply can't do anything else for you, who can't help but say what is on their mind.

They make me crazy... but they wouldn't have me any other way. And I love them. And the One I serve does too.

wasteland.

A quickened heartbeat after a quick march up a flight of stairs greets a student's sallow face outside of the dusty concrete classroom. Hair disheveled, voice dim, trembling hands and damp eyes relay news of a classmate's mother at the hospital, bad situation suddenly worse, and can he be excused today Ms. Kelly? A teacher catches her breath which has managed to get stuck like a wad of cotton in her throat of course.

A girl sits in the second row face completely concealed and shoulders crushed under the weight of something no one can see. Her complete withdrawal from everything shocking as she embodies absence. A ten minute break in the lesson. A teacher slides into the empty seat next to her leans in close whispers what is wrong. Broken detached phrases articulate a hometown destroyed, a brother missing, relatives dead, and a tear streaked face glances upwards: flooded eyes meet flooded eyes. A teacher's hand rests on an absent girls back and words disappear and a heart crashes to the floor to join the other.

A slow dragging of one foot before another across the school yard after class. A student stumbles behind words spew forth she is like my sister but sad like this for many days I told her don't be like this never cry... A teacher stops mid-stride, turns pauses corrects If you were really her brother your heart would be like hers, you would be the same as her, not tell her this wrong thing... A student stunned. A breeze blows an empty bag across the ground. I told her say om mane padme hum then she is okay. A teacher stares in anger deep into the eyes of the student, rolls her own, turns away from such nonsense. The walk continues the chat continues. The teacher stops one last time Listen. Anything, anything I can do I want to do... you tell her also, and as for you if you have some hurt you tell me. You are my students and you are not alone. And deep dark Tibetan eyes blink back a watery ocean.

See I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.

I'm living in the wasteland... I just didn't realize that the streams were going to be tears.

Life droplets

Mr Wu: I am not good at telling stories. I will go on telling stories.
Me: Jai oh!

The breeze felt cool even as my face prickled with heat foreshadowing probable sunburn. My plodding walk down the nearly deserted backstreet away from the monastery shuffled dust on the asphalt. I paused to watch half a dozen small boys with their pants rolled up to their thighs, yet still wearing socks, wading through the mucky runoff of a nearby pipe. My mind jostled with the discouraging deadlock I had just reached with a friend over lunch...

Soba: The problem is that we are both decided about two different things.
Me: The real problem is that only one of us decided correctly.

I walked on.

Arriving at my friend's room in a house in an alley in the middle of nowhere a little early I was welcomed as if I couldn't have come at a better time. Tea was immediately poured and after an hour of Tibetan lessons to the amusement of a relative whom no one could remember the name of the room cleared out and I was left to sit with only her. Tender after the hollow week I'd had before it didn't unsettle me in the slightest to find myself mirroring her tears as she recounted her life's misfortunes, the stream of which ended with the death of her mother last term and included harrowing accounts of years and entire villages' incomes in hospitals, the loss of opportunities as a result of poverty, the loss of hope as a result of debt, concluding only that her family has so much tsampa but never enough money...

Tsomo: my sister says I should never cry in front of you.
Me: your sister is wrong.

We finished the tea.

The evening still light I walk with my student back to the school. It could have been a long walk with the dappled shadows of the newly green leaves of the trees caressing the silence between us. Instead, the soft spoken mumblings of far too shy English gushed forth from a student who I've spent countless hours with but never had what amounted to more than ten minutes of actual conversation with. Tales of her studies, her observations of the past week, her time with annoying nephews, her hopes that I would continue to teach them new words, her frequent desires to talk to me thwarted by her crippling shyness, and her cure for homesickness. The littered road was too short, the evening light too dim, the time escaping like a kite through clumsy hands and we arrived back at the school...

Qamju: I hope teacher can every day be happy, never sick at heart.
Me: Thank you.

I turned towards my building.

Mr. Wu: In the end the boy dies and the girl lives. The meaning is love can never without pain.
Me: That's a horrible story.

The tin man

In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy comes across a man so dry and stiff that he can barely ask for the oil he needs. Nevermind that he's completely hollow, even lacking a heart.

Shiny on the outside; empty within.

He turns out to be the second of her most loyal companions. Through a series of misadventures it becomes obvious that the reason the Tin man is perpetually dry and stiff is that he is perpetually heartbroken. He cries himself stiff. If it weren't for his fragile heart, which he claims he doesn't have, he would never get into such a mess.

In the end, the wizard graciously gives him a new one.

************************************************************

This week my defining emotion has been hollowness. Empty. You would never know it. I look healthy. There's nothing wrong with my body, but look again, tap me, there's nothing inside.

This is my tin man week.

The truth is I have so much to rejoice in (opportunities with the staff, encouragement from friends, advancement in language learning, improvement in my students, hilarity from my boss...) just no ability to do it. It's like some part of me gave up. Like all the small things that I count as triumphs weren't enough, like the never ending stream of blessing that has been promised to me missed the cup and spilled all over the floor instead. It's like all the hurt, all the lostness, all the darkness, all the confusion, all the inability, and all the smallness of every moment of daily life here suddenly rose up to greet me... and I cried myself stiff and dry and am no longer able to ask for the oil I need.

But you're going to ask for me right?

Because truly there's too much to do, too many chances for the kingdom to break through, too much need, too many opportunities to let light and love come rushing through the door for me to stand stiff in a corner with my back to it all pleading through dried up lips for oil. Where is that fragile heart of mine?

This week I'm the tin man... but I know what it is to be the scarecrow and the cowardly lion too... and it's not too rare that I find myself as Dorothy wishing for some magic ruby slippers.

A true story

Ms. Kelly you believe Yesu. Yes. I tell you story.
This is a true story Ms. Kelly.

I know a boy he is not a monk... one day will be monk... one day his monk teacher called me said to me that this boy is lost. First I don't believe he is lost... then his teacher said this boy call me I right away call him. I scared this boy. Maybe one day past this lost boy called me. He isn't from Lhasa. He doesn't know how to get back to the monastery. I go to find this boy... he is live with Chinese family. Ms. Kelly, they take him buy him new math book, new tibetan book, new shoes. They ask me the boy no family they will take care him send him to good school no problem. I told them he has family he will be monk... so they let him go back to monastery. I ask Chinese people why they do all this and these people tell me about Yesu. They believe him really.

So before I never can't believe in Yesu. But if Yesu does this. Now I think maybe Yesu is so good.

He really is so good.

The least athletic days of the year

All my life I grew up hating sports with the fixed determination of the overweight kid who could never make a free throw. Until China. Until sports day.

Sports day: Two to three days of collective lounging on the football field, complete with various events which the participating students never bothered to train for and usually with the limply thrown javelin for effect, the national anthem basically nonstop, Chinese teachers wearing goofy hats, and the consumption of your annual quota of sunflower seeds.

People, I love it. I love it almost as much as the staff cafeteria.

Cause when I walked out of my house Friday morning in time to watch all of the students I've ever taught wearing an array of at least mostly black colored clothing and marching around the track to easily the worst middle school marching band on earth complete with plastic drums, and I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of some of the hats my colleagues were wearing... I knew it was going to be a good couple of days.

Sports day is where things happen. Things like cheering like crazy for some students barely able to stand up after twelve laps around the track, like drinking the nastiest combination of butter tea, coke, and juice imaginable to engage the hospitality of students past and current, like joining teachers forced to spend the day holding stopwatches to their utter disbelief that anyone would want to, like taking pictures with the nice man who helped you in the cafeteria and always is so kind only to find out that he is the vice chairman of the school, like getting to see your boss wear a baseball cap and gleefully use a megaphone, like getting invited to eat noodles with some teachers by simply being at the right place at the right time, like taking nearly a thousand pictures, like accepting invitations to learn to cook dumplings from students who you only began to teach, like making announcements over the intercom for the whole school to hear, like seeing neighbors and students that you thought had transferred or just disappeared... things.

Sports day is a chance for me to pretend like I actually belong here, and get more excited about the opportunity than the people who actually belong here do.

And this year's closing ceremonies: dinner and tea with the boys from a class I taught last year. A chance I'd never had to be with them all together and hear about their dreams and their families and their past year's experiences. A chance I'd never had to figure out who they are and what is important to them. A chance to get a cramp in my stomach laughing because Yes Suoguo's bed is clean Ms. Kelly... but his socks...

I can't wait till next year. Shukeyup!