Laura Joy Land

Today marks one year in Indonesia, and my goodness, what a year it's been! Time to reflect a little. I say a little, because I've just finished teaching for the day and am feeling rather frazzled, so I probably won't be able to reflect too deeply at this time on a Monday. When I arrived in Batam one year ago today, I was on an adventure. New country, culture, language, job, people, places...everything was to be different. Now, one year on, this is my home, although many things are still new to me, and I've only recently begun giving the language the attention it's due. Then and Now Then: Blimey it was hot! Two cold showers a day to survive those first few weeks, frizzy hair, lots of sweat, not pretty. Now: Blimey it's hot! But most of the time I don't notice. If the AC isn't working when I have to teach Grade 1, well then of course I notice, but other than that I could be forgiven for forgetting I'm on a tropical island while I'm at wo...

Happy Monday everyone! It's lunchtime already, woohoo! I shall be enjoying my usual: white rice with spicy aubergines, broccoli and carrots. Spicy aubergines are delicious, in case you were wondering. Coincidentally, my fetus is currently the size of an aubergine. That is all. :)

This week turned out to be a great week for me, but it didn't start off so well. On Sunday night I had a serious case of the blues after a previous hellish week. I felt totally miserable at the thought of going to work, and bitter that I had no choice in the matter. When Monday morning came around, I was greeted by the discovery of more mouse excrement in my work space, followed later that day by the mouse itself, which has decided my desk should be used as a toilet rather than a place to store school supplies and student work. Last week, when I first noticed a few droppings on my desk, when said droppings were not cleaned up properly, and when I then couldn't even wash my hands due to the absence of running water at school, it would be very accurate to say that I lost my patience. Last week I also lost my patience several times during teaching, which was both exhausting and frustrating. Hence the topic of this entry. The limits of my patience have been severely tested recentl...

 On to a more amusing topic...*chuckle-chuckle* Isn't it always the case, or rather, shouldn't it always be the case, that the cruddiest places are also the funniest? I work in a cruddy school, where cruddy things happen on a daily basis. However, I often find myself, along with my colleagues, laughing merrily in spite of - nay, because of all the crud that surrounds us. I want to take a moment to document the laughter. Not the reasons for laughing, but the laughs themselves that I hear daily... A male colleague: he speaks with a very deep masculine voice, but his laugh contains a periodic high pitched gasp. It's marvelous. A female colleague: laughs a lot, loudly, with what I call the "my life is better than yours and I want you to know it" laugh. The Headmaster: Always laughing, almost never about anything funny, or at least not as funny as you'd expect from the level of laughter being emitted. Like an amused schoolboy laughing at something bey...

Today I arrived at work to find rat shit on my office chair. This was not a surprise to me, as this was unfortunately a repeat experience from Friday. On Friday, I had to ask three times before my desk and chair were adequately cleaned. I suggested that the whole room (a space accommodating around 30 teachers) should be vacuumed and disinfected, but of course that didn't happen. In the middle of the night on Friday, I found myself in the Emergency Room, vomiting uncontrollably for no obvious reason. Coincidence? Probably, but that doesn't help me not to be paranoid about all the invisible germs around me. This is how my first Monday morning conversation went, after asking for the cleaner to get rid off the rat shit... My boss: Is it ok now? Me: No... My boss: but I saw the cleaner, he was already there. Me: Yes, but all he did was wipe the rat pooh from my chair on to the floor under my desk. My boss: So? What should he do? Me: Uh, get rid of the pooh rather than put...