For months I’ve waited. Bhutan sits on the Northern edge of the wettest region of the world, between the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal. The monsoon is supposed to have arrived by now. Perhaps it has.
When I first arrived here it hadn’t rained in months. The evenings were cold and I heated up water on my stove to wash with. Then in March and April a few sporadic heavy showers arrived, seldom lasting for more than hour and separated by weeks, bringing with them spectacular lightning storms. I stood and looked out of my bedroom window, listening to the excited cries of the boarders outside, gleefully cheering each thunderbolt as they shuffled down to dinner in the downpour. It has gotten hotter and I have moved to having cold showers from the showerhead on the wall. For the past month we have seen light patches of rain and foggy mornings. I continue to wait.
According to government meteorologists, the monsoon begins on June fifth, plus or minus five days. This has me imagining something sudden, emphatic and biblical, as if one minute I will be walking in the sunshine across the school field and the next I will stagger through the door of the staffroom, puddle forming beneath me, saturated books under my arm, and cryptically pronounce, “The rains have come… ”. I imagine farmers on their knees in their fields, arms extended to the sky like the famous shot from Platoon, as the deluge thunders down on their crops. Not yet, however.
There have been some changes. For one thing, the insect life has livened up. Almost nightly I climb around my bedroom with a t-shirt or handkerchief in hand to capture one of the big, brown bugs that have found their way inside. I have to move them outside or they will spend the night buzzing around, noisily colliding into my walls. They have been joined by a family of charming little lizards that has made their home in my kitchen.
Cockroaches come out at night. Many are distressingly big, about the size of my thumb. I get a fright when they scurry away after I turn on the lights to go pee before bedtime. I extract revenge with one of my jandals, which I have on hand for using my squat toilet. On one evening about three weeks back I delivered divine justice from the door of my bathroom to a scuttling roach on the opposite wall with a well-placed fling. I stood admiring my marksmanship for a moment before scooping him up in my dustpan, dropping him down the toilet bowl and, as a last show of disdain, weeing on him.
I can’t do anything about them so I just have to accept that cockroaches have crawled and crapped all over my kitchenware and, judging by the little black specks that appeared around it until I moved it to its travel container, my toothbrush. It is one of those facts you acknowledge but look away from, like when you read that your kitchen sponge is dirtier than your toilet bowl or when the guy next to you doesn’t wash his hands before leaving the public bathroom. Or, indeed, when you notice the complete absence of hand soap in any public bathroom in Bhutan.
In anticipation of mosquitoes I asked one of my friends to pick me up a net while he was visiting his family in Damphu, the closest town one district over. I was rather proud last week when I had finished banging nails into my plaster walls and stringing it up on rope over my bed. It’s a nice net: yellow with little pink flowers on it. Its price, 480 ngultrums, is written on the side in vivid. I don’t know why they do that here. I have pots and spoons, the veterans of months of meals, on which I can still see the price because the helpful shop owner has written on all of his products in permanent marker.
But my point is that the heat and moisture have brought insects. What haven’t come, at least yet, are snakes. Everyone tells me that Drujeygang is a ‘snake prone area’ but apart from almost absent-mindedly stepping on a tiddler while going for a run a month or two ago, I have been disappointed. Back when the lama visited, the Dzongda (district governor) showed me a picture of a cobra in the roadside grass on his phone that he had taken that morning. I was a little envious.
I want to burnish my adventuring credentials with pant-shitting but nevertheless survivable encounters. Oh yes, I’ve seen snakes, I want to say to my future children. I don’t want to actually be in danger, mind you, I just want to see something exotic and scary. From a safe distance. Perhaps from inside a vehicle.
Anyway, the term grinds on. I am used to the New Zealand school year, which is divided into four terms of approximately ten weeks, separated by two week breaks. In fact since age five my life has been modulated by the cycle of terms and holidays. After leaving school I spent a year working at a school in England (three terms a year) before going to University (three terms a year) and starting teaching. Here in Bhutan the school year runs from February to December and is split in two by a single two week break. Each term is seventeen weeks long.
Now, of course, hearing the refrain that seventeen straight weeks of work is somehow unbearable or inhumane must sound a little indulgent to anyone employed outside of education. The truth is I don’t know how the majority of humanity does it. I don’t know how it would feel, once you have had your annual three or four weeks of mandated holiday (two in the United States), to look at the next year laid out in front of you with forty-eight identical Monday to Friday cycles broken only by a small handful of three day weekends.
People say teaching is more tiring that other jobs, and hence requires more holidays. That might be true, I wouldn’t know. Teaching is my first grown up job. England’s Health and Safety Executive found teaching among the professions with the highest prevalence rates of work-related stress, depression and anxiety, next to health professionals (especially nurses) and ‘health and social care associate professionals’. In the UK, four out of ten teachers leave the job within the first year.
However I find it hard to believe that it would be more exhausting than firefighting, say, or being a lawyer, and they don’t get holidays. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 40% of American police officers have a sleep disorder. As a teacher, nobody’s going to die in your hands. The most stressful thing is having to cover up when you’re forced to smack one of your students around a bit. That and parent-teacher interviews (sometimes a result of the former).
So why are there school holidays? Is it because the students need them or the teachers do? As far as I can tell from my limited research, there isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t have school holidays. In Estonia the summer holidays last for three months.
Both the UK education minister Michael Gove and US President Barack Obama are in favour of longer school days and shorter holidays. Though the evidence of shorter holidays raising achievement is inconclusive, there are some points on the side of those who want to shorten, or even do away with, school holidays. Students spend their holidays forgetting what they have learnt at school (and, if they use their time well, having underage sex and taking drugs). Underprivileged students especially benefit from more schooling, due to a lack of formal reading and writing at home. There would be no school holiday inflation of travel prices. Non-teaching parents wouldn’t have to organise child care or take time off during the breaks.
A last point, that Greg Martin of The Telegraph makes, is that shortening the summer break and instead having more regular two week breaks throughout the year would make teaching less stressful because teachers could ‘plan better’. But then where would the joy be in triumphantly stuffing your students’ precious posters and science projects into the wheely bin at the end of the year? He asks, ‘Would it not be less stressful and more efficient to have a longer school day with time to deliver a rich, rounded curriculum?’ Fuck you, Greg Martin, along with your silly, meaningless adjectives. No it wouldn’t.
If there were even whispers of abolishing school holidays you would see chemistry teachers behind barricades, baying for the minister of education to be guillotined and vice-principals leading their faculties through the streets to the steps of parliament waving burning effigies of cabinet members. English teachers would mix Molotov cocktails and biology teachers would sharpen their scalpels. There would be car bombs and anonymous calls from pay phones in which the PPTA would claim responsibility. There wouldn’t be a single apostrophe on a single placard out of place (and no mercy would be shown). It chills the blood.
Perhaps the most important thing that school holidays do is they give you something to look forward to. You can lie to yourself and promise that next term, next term, you will get all of your marking back on time, you will check your students books each week, you will organise that professional development folder that you can see looking down at you from the shelf above your desk. And then you go to end of term staff drinks and forget all about it.
Maybe I am seeing, first hand, how privileges become entrenched and how difficult they are to take away.
There are other ways in which school is different here. For the last two weeks we have had exams. I stride sternly across the concrete floors between rows of wobbly wooden desks and students on plastic chairs with furrowed brows, busily scribbling answers on cheap, discoloured paper. They are nervous and worried. They have reason to be. The principal told them after a poor showing in their unit tests at the end of May that anyone who fails any one of his or her midterm exams will not be allowed back to school until next year. Because that is what struggling students need: less school. I can’t tell whether it is an empty threat or not, but it is emblematic of the broader attitude here.
This is a larger topic for another email but, not for the first time, I find my sympathies being with the students against the staff. Teachers can skip classes, steal the exams they are supposed to write from their friends at other schools, take months to return work and unashamedly talk loudly during assembly but if the students do worse than expected in a stupidly designed test from a stupidly designed curriculum, they get harangued for hours.
But that’s a story for another day. This seventeen week term is winding down, the trees are green, and the air is sultry. The terraced fields around Drujeygang are lush with crops. The evenings pulse with the sounds of insects. And tomorrow I will be heading East for two weeks to explore another part of the country. I will be going to Trashigang, where BCF has organised a reunion for all of the teachers in the field. I have seen four Westerners in the past five months.
A few years ago I spent a summer in between university years living by myself in a caravan in a campground on the banks of the Waitangi River in the Bay of Islands. I got up late each day to mop toilets and empty those cute little rubbish bins where womenfolk put their sanitary pads, then dig and prune things and pull out weeds around the campground in the afternoons. It was a blissful time and one of the things I remember about it was that I never really missed anyone.
Nevertheless, near the end of my two and half months there, two of my best friends hitchhiked up to surprise me. They turned up outside my caravan in the late summer evening and we sat inside drinking wine and beer, listening to music and swapping stories about our respective summers. I remember being struck with the thought: How nice it is to be with your friends.
I think that is where I am now. I am quite happy here, teaching six days a week, going for runs, reading, playing guitar, cooking for myself in the evenings. I play football with the other teachers after school and afterwards we go to the canteen and drink juice.
And yet I think I am about to be surprised all over again at how nice it is to be with people who share your world. That is not to say that the people here aren’t my friends, they truly, genuinely are (I had a big end-of-term party for everyone at my house just this Thursday), but even though we spent less than two weeks together in Thimphu at the end of January, all of the other foreign teachers and I have something in common: We left our lives in the West to come to isolated, rural communities in Bhutan. I’m rather excited to see them all again.
