The Elements of Gatlang Elementary

As most know - I came here to do some teaching amongst other things. My first project is in a remote village called Gatlang. The school, the teachers, the kids... the stories!

"Two of the (government employed) teachers live next door so they took me to the school. There I met the other teachers, and the headmaster - Uli. Cool guy, looks like an Etheopian drug trafficker who still lives with his parents. They're not very strict amd the kids have lots of fun. Just before the bell is donged by the concierge (or maybe he's a teacher, but I wasn't introduced and he looks retarted) the kids are directed into 10 lines of about 15 - and two of the gurus conduct a kind of aerobics class. Hilarious - but I had to keep a straight face."

"Now get this - it's exam week, and the festival starts next week, so the school is basically shut. I get to teach from 07.00-09.00 and from 16.00-18.00. As soon as the kids were in the classrooms, Uli showed me the 'library' (class number 7!!!) - and told me that the books had been stolen. Then Lama, one of the Guest House Family, arrived with an old sports bag full of mouldy paper and old pencils and some pens and 1 book which was WAY to difficult for 5-8 year olds..."

"The word for 'shortie' is pud-ke. I use it a lot. For all the kids as well as most animals and insects - I love the word. I've got one dedicated 14 y/o pupil, the rest are pud-ke's who only want to draw and colour. One afternoon I was only just too late to save a gorgeous hairy caterpiller from an undulely execution by stonage just outside my classroom, which I have called "Little Britain". I didn't want to laugh but the sight of these pud-ke's faces when I asked them why they murdered my friend... I told the girl who had delivered the final blow (using a rock the size of my fist) to clean up the mess, but she just ran and hid in one of the other classrooms."

"There was one pud-ke dressed in an army outfit, so I called him the Gurkha-pudke. No one got it, but I giggled. None of the kids had understood my message of peace to animals because this time they were throwing rocks at a spider, inside the classroom, while I was teaching...! So I gave them the evil third eye a few times and let it escape. We went over the first few lines of "Yellow Submarine" , which was funny because prior to the class I had made up my mind to approach it as if I were in the 60's/70's, simple, no technology - just me as a bookless pioneer, teaching innocent mountain people in a faraway land."

"I thought about teaching the pud-ke's to beatbox... but considering the filthy hands and ever snotty noses that seemed a bit unethical..."

To be continued...