Monday, June 25, 2012

Malaise


The 10th graders all left this morning in a truck, off to the prefectural capital to take the week-long high school entrance exam. The excitement of forty students about to do the most scholastically important task of their lives thus far, in a city (well, town) over this hills and through the woods, was almost palpable. Once the truck was gone, so was everything else, even the tiny children that had gathered, even the dust.
The village tailor, who I finally have started to frequent, seems unwilling (or unable?) to take the time to make seams straight and match patterns on my shirts, or cut the shoulders to the size requested. He is, however, incredibly affable.

Even if the tailoring were superb, the more wearable patterns are all printed on miserable polyester fabric, hot and scratchy and flammable. Perhaps this is part of the reason most people wear occidental hand-me-downs instead of localishly produced garb.

The school year isn’t over, but it has faded away to nothing. The seventh grade math teacher stopped coming after the first week of May: he had finished the curriculum, so…. Grades are supposed to be turned in posthaste, but the principal didn’t give me the paper I need to draw up the reports before he left with the 10th graders, and I didn’t remind him. The teachers and students seem more concerned with rankings than with the grades that create them.

The abundance of produce that coincides with the start of the rainy season has also faded away, and now only small onions, small chili peppers, and occasional avocados are available. Even mangos, once so numerous they were free, are scarce, and seem less tasty.

The rain that does fall is not the cathartic showers that flew down from low black clouds like bombs; it is softer, longer, colder, and more oppressive.

I am charging my computer more often, watching a movie almost every day.

Reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow reminds that there are Muslim countries with ice and cheese.