a glimpse of a day

dear friends and lovers,

so i have gone from random updates to weekly updates to no updates. where is james? egad! so says my mother and father who only partially mockingly let me know that they were glad to hear i'm alive. so i've been mia for a bit, but we have had electricity problems and my school had internet issues and then i went on retreat. enough excuses. frankly i find a blog hard to update. maybe it is my perspective that is skewed, but my life is not an adventure. i am not motorcycling through europe or climbing volcanos in asia. my life is, believe it or not, quite boring. i wake up before 7am, i get dressed, read some daily reflections from merton or the psalms, take a half hour long bus ride to work when i either read or journal about the previous day and my thoughts. i then take another half hour 3 wheel moto taxi ride to get to my school where i fear for my life because of the poor quality of the road. i get to school, sweep my classroom, make sure i'm ready for class, realize its 10:05 and still no students. i go around the school looking for and rounding up my students so that we start by 10 after or so. i teach them for about 40 min. english phrases and words that most are able to forget in mere minutes much less remember anything from the day before. i repeat this 2 more times until lunch time comes around. i eat lunch, usually in silence (me, not the students) and then i return to my classroom. i might sweep again, i might read a little. i might check my email at this time or maybe plan some things for my afternoon classes. at 2:00 my level 2 english students start to wander in and i usually am asking them "what did you do last night" or "what did you do this weekend" to practice the simple past tense. sometimes, however, with these students i will forego english class to discuss more pertinent things. take, for example, the other day when a fight broke out between 2 students. punches thrown kicks etc. the director and another teacher were in the street outside of the school and stood there watching the fight from the other side of the fence, so i was the first teacher there as the students were breaking it up. the director threw both of the kids out for the afternoon, and they were both back the next day. so with my english level 2 students we talked (in spanish) about why there was a fight, why do we fight, is it right to hit people when they hit you etc. etc. 3:00 and i teach my level 1 english class which has changed from 20 students to 1 student to 30 when they re-registered for the class to now when i have about 8, only one of which was in the original 30 and the others that have showed up and said "profe, can i be in your class?" and me saying, sure, why the heck not. we will be doing foods soon. 4:00 comes, i get on the school bus with 100 roudy students who will throw spit balls and food scraps at each other, will flick me in the ears, play with my hair, and hit each other as i generally try to ignore them as they try to annoy me and try to intervene as they hit each other, both with only moderate success. we get to where i catch my other bus between 4:30 and 5:00 depending on our bus driver and the daily quality of the road. and then i take another bus where, if i get a seat, i read until i get home... usually between 5 and 6 depending on traffic and other sorts of things. i sit in my house until we eat dinner. i sit some more with my community until i brush my teeth and go to bed. other things i may do depending on the day are play guitar, cook dinner, meet about our community, meet about our faith. and that, my friends, is pretty much every day. jvi, for me, has been a lot more about accepting the slow repetitiveness of the days and accepting how helpless i am in the face of such great need and poverty. i pass a man on the street. he is high on glue and hungry. gosh, maybe i'll teach him english. nope, i'll just smile and nod and carry on my way. so this is why i don't usually update my blog because 90 percent of my life is lived in the same day after day way. i could, i guess, write about my thoughts but those are even starting to sound pretentious to me, so i write in my journal, and i'm sorry you aren't able to read that, but it might not interest you either. please do not write me saying you think i'm doing wonderful work and please do not worry that i am despairing. neither of these are true. i am not doing "wonderful work." i teach english for a non-profit that wants to teach kids computer and english skills so that they have an opportunity to succeed in a business world that doesn't value human beings but only human skills. it is not glorious, it is not horrendous, it just is. it is not attempting to address injustices in the current capitalistic value system in order to bring more freedom to those suffering from oppression and it definately isn't trying to revolt against the current system by embracing holy ways of living and being human. it is giving kids a chance to make it in the system we have now that requires that many many suffer so that a few can succeed, so some of mine may succeed but countless others will continue to die. and i do not despair. i find happiness in sunday morning breakfasts and saturday night hide and go seek, 15 year old students that are still ticklish enough for me to use that maneuver during a game of soccer and farmers that love moonshine. so i live in joy, but i do not feel any desire to write about it. so do not be surprised if this is updated only rarely, when something shareworthy happens, because things do happen, but most of the time reading a blog of mine would be as exciting a reading a blog from your own highschool english teacher or spanish teacher. not fun. so be blessed and have a lovely life enjoying the simple things that cannot be expressed or written about and keep writing about them anyway so that you may grow wise about yourself and the world around you.

james