my house in dhaka is in the most peaceful neighborhood in this city, and still it is a dirty place full of beggars - mothers with babies, loiterers, primitive-style construction projects and the smell of raw sewage all around us all the time. the walk between house and school, cool haven to cool haven, feels absurd almost every day. twelve streets behind my house you cross through a gate to go outside the 'diplomatic enclave' into something much poorer. today i took a short walk there and i'm sure i saw a man dying in the gravels on the side of the road while we all world walked by him. a metaphor hit me. i got hit by a rickshaw today. i had a scarf on and looked like anyone else from behind, and a rickshaw ran right into me from the back with its big back wheels. it didn't hurt at all, though it gave me a good knock off my feet. it shocked me and the driver too though he looked more stressed than worried.
i have developed a way of moving around town that is very uncharacteristic of me. i've learned to stare with glazed eyes straight ahead and not to look directly at anyone, in general. i don't answer to constant calls for rickshaws or bakshish/change. i try not to let the children in the city touch me, though they want to, because they look sick sometimes and dirty always. i have often walked the quarter mile home from school with a rickshaw driver pedaling right beside me slowly, as close as possible, hoping i will change my mind and get in. we might be the only two people for 100 meters, me and my rickshaw buddy who says nothing much but rings his bell over and over at my ear.
last thursday i held the first photo club meeting, and showed the photographer of the day mary ellen mark. she photographed mother theresa in her mission in calcutta. i showed the kids these pictures, and realized that the images are familiar to any child growing up in bangladesh - even expat kids. the streets sometimes look like the pictures of the mission.
www.maryellenmark.com click "books" and see 'mother theresa's mission'
note to self and everyone that cindy mccain raised a child she adopted from mother theresa's orphanage here in dhaka in the 90s.
i'm not yet sure how to come to terms with dhaka.
in the mean time, the international teaching circuit is seductive. jimmy and beckly and i talk about this as we begin to see the big picture of the international education community; the way that couples hop around the world making good money, living for free, having maids and drivers and cooks and aiyahs take care of their at-home basics while they play tennis and golf at the expat clubs. actually i really am not hating on these teachers; they have made some neat career and life decisions:
in the states teachers are paid below their worth and given hard workloads and sometimes frightening student performance requirements. the international schools are private schools funded by governments and corporations who pay to send their employees children to good schools abroad. these schools serve a talented and worldly group of kids and their parents. the school facilities are veritable community centers, with open gyms and swimming pools and soccer fields and community education classes in any hobby you might want to explore on the weekends. these schools gave birth to the IB program. and so on...
there is a nice family who came from Houston to join the AISD team this year. the wife Karly is a kindergarten teacher, the husband Mike a high school special needs teacher and a football coach. they are a mixed race couple with two smart and nice boys around age 5 and 8. the parents in this family were burned by years of public school teaching in Houston. they say the schools were terrible places. in fact they paid to send Mike's older sons from an earlier marriage to private high school there. they wanted an option for their younger kids that would give them strong education basics in the early grades and not require them to pay private school prices for years to come. so someone told them about international teaching and they really thought hard about it. two people who hadn't traveled before picked up their family and moved to bangladesh:
at AISD Karly and Mike make significantly more than your average public school teachers at home, and their housing is paid for (like all of us), and they can easily afford a cook and nanny, and their two sons get to attend school for free (...you guys have gathered that this is a REALLY good school). they are going to save a lot of money these next years; people do that here.
some of the teachers have a goal to see the world. some of the teachers have a goal to make a living. mostly there are people doing as much as they can of both.
