Christmas Gifts

Dedicated to my father and all those who have passed through my life for a season.

Today at LAMB school in Bangladesh, I had to give an assembly looking at Christmas and this gave me an opportunity to be thinking about what this seasonal festivity means to me as a foreigner abroad. At the same time, after the assembly, we said goodbye to two students who have been with us for most of their lives, I think. The boy, Mueed, I don’t know every well – incredibly he’s one of the few that I haven’t taught here! The girl, Anumita, I’ve always taught. I know her very well and I am really sad that she is leaving.

Anu is going to join the Bangladeshi school over the road from us. This may seem an odd move considering that the education at LAMB is undoubtedly good. You may be thinking, if there is a Bangladeshi school very close by, why have an English Medium school teaching O levels and English National Curriculum syllabus at all? What is the point of teaching a foreign system?

It is a good point and one, I’m rather glad to say, I was not involved with when decisions about the school were made. I came in with the knowledge that O levels had been decided upon and the teaching had already begun so I just slotted into a system that was already there. Likewise, the National Curriculum had been followed for years, long before I came. I have no preference myself.

Nevertheless, the school was set up to be an alternative – in almost everyway – to the national system and to give options to students and their parents that they would not otherwise have had. This is important when we live in an environment where head teachers can still demand bribes to take on students, where teachers (and heads) can beat whole classes of kids and get away with it because the school has to give a ‘Transfer Certificate’ if a child wants to go to another school. If you take your child out of school because they beat her you will not get that certificate. Or where teaching is deliberately poor so that parents are forced to pay for private teachers to teach the subject after school in their homes – often the same teacher who was teaching poorly in the class! This is the expected way that teachers earn a substantial part of their income. For this reason, all teachers at LAMB are forbidden to teach privately.

Not all schools are as bad as this, of course, and many children leave LAMB and go to other schools where they are perfectly happy. We see many kids come into the school (it has a large waiting list of students who wish to join) and we see many leave. So why am I sad about Anu?

I think, more than anything else, it is because I have formed a relationship with her over the years, as I have with all my students. I took so long to decide to come to Bangladesh because of this kind of attachment. I loved the company of all the students I taught in Whitehaven, England and cared about what would happen to their education if I left. Now, here, I think the same when I see a student leave. What will happen to their education, their life, their hope, their future when they leave here? I can’t help but worry and feel sad that they have slipped away. I feel like I have got it wrong in some way.

So then, I have to keep reminding myself why LAMB school is here. We provide an alternative to the national system. It is right that parents exercise that right to opt in or out. Our job is to make sure students are prepared for either option. It would not be right if we somehow ‘trapped’ parents into our system in just the same way they can be trapped in the national one. Still, I can’t help but feel I must have got it wrong if someone felt they wanted to exercise that freedom.

Thankfully, Christmas has come at just the right time to help me find some kind of an answer to my anguish.

As a Christian school we are preparing for Borodin and remembering the gift given us in the form of Jesus as a child. The act of giving presents to remind us of this gift has been lost or destroyed for most in the West by the greed of materialism. Many shops obtain a vital proportion of their income from Christmas so if they fail to get it one year they go bust. Get it another year and they are rich. I can’t see the difference between that and gambling to be honest.

I think the original idea of the gift needs to be found again. It is not a thing but a person - Jesus. If nothing else the importance of another human being given for us is, at least, part of the point of this story in the Gospels. The things don’t matter – people do. The gift I will receive, this year, is my family and my friends wherever they are. It is the love that comes from those you love that sees you through the year. It is the people who pass through your life. It is Anumita and Mueed and all the other many students I have had the honour of knowing – even on a very small scale.

This Christmas, I want to be more aware than ever, that I have all the gifts I could ever need right here with me now even if, physically, some of them are thousands of miles away. I need to appreciate that sometimes those gifts are temporary, meant to be in my life for a season and then to go again.

My family and I are struggling with not being home. We miss the UK, the snow that everyone there is complaining about, the decorations, the cheesy music and the warm glow that is all around at this time of year. But one day we will be back and then every Christmas we will be missing Bangladesh instead! We will see all the problems back in the UK and long for the perfect images that our memories trick us with and pine for Bangladesh. It is good to miss the past - but not if we fail to see the present slipping past us.

Instead, I need to be able to say ‘This is where I am now. This is here. This is the gift for me right now.’ I need to say thank you for those who have been put in my life. And I can be thankful for the gift of those that were with me in years gone by. Whether on the other side of the world or having gone to another world I can miss them and rejoice that they were entrusted to me for a little while.

And I can use this to remind myself that what I have now is equally entrusted for a just a short while. I must not let it slip by unawares.

Opposites Attract

“Right then,” I said to the attentive Grade Eights “Today we shall look at magnetism. And I have some magnets right here to show you.”

This was a moment of some excitement for both the students and myself, I have to say. In the course of the two years I have spent at LAMB. Most of the subjects I have taught have been science related. Not bad for someone who qualified as a musician and has spent most of the last eighteen years teaching music. Although my teaching qualification qualifies me to teach “any subject” to “any age group” there are some subjects I am not likely to try my hand at.

Physical Education, for instance.

Anyone who really knows me will need no telling what a disaster it would be if I was left in charge of a bunch of teenagers to use what I consider to be illegal weapons in the form of cricket bats, balls and that most deadly of weapon, the skipping rope. Even worse if it was my Fourth Grade class who sit attentively for me in our science class but, I suspect, would become as stealthy and lethal as Ninja dwarves if allowed anywhere near shuttlecocks and racquets. And then there is hockey. The thought of me controlling (just not possible) a group of teenage girls playing that particular form of abuse does not bear thinking about. I suspect I would find myself in hospital as much as most of the losing team (and a fair number of the winning side too).

Similarly, despite great artistic skill buried deep, deep within my soul, I think that teaching art could only result in either a new wave of artistic expression that would leave the Dadaists speechless or a disaster in the classroom of epic proportions which would result in the cleaning ayah not speaking to me for the rest of my (presumably short) life.

Still, most other subjects I have taught from time to time and I very nearly went down the maths/science route for my own career before choosing music so this is a reasonably safe area for me to teach. Except for one area.

Practicals.

Now, it is a well-established rule in the science world (at least in the one involved with education) that if an experiment can go wrong it will go wrong. I regularly suggest to my students that if they do an experiment that actually goes right then they must take care not to damage the universe further as when an experiment goes right the whole universe is destroyed and instantly replaced with an identical one (who says I can’t screw with their minds at least a little bit). We would never know it has happened, but it is just damned annoying to know that it has.

On a more realistic plane, I do have the very real fear that if I am responsible for an experiment I could be responsible for a whole range of deaths and disfigurements. Electrocution, acid burns, poisoning, glass shards ripping out eyes, hearing loss, fingers trapped in contraptions and (most heinous of all) tea spilt on the teacher’s laptop. I have not heard of a single school in the UK that has not had some kind of accident usually resulting in a trip to the hospital. Of course, the staff there will have been fully trained and experienced, they themselves having conducted hundreds of experiments so that when it goes wrong (and it will) they know they did everything right. I don’t think I could ever be entirely sure.

So, I will teach theory up to any level of complexity but I do not do experiments. Instead I spend hours downloading videos from the internet (legally, I hope) of others doing experiments to show the kids instead. Generally, this works well but, well, it must be said, it can be boring. I’ve not yet fallen both asleep and off my stool whilst actually talking and teaching but I have come close. I am reminded of the teacher at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter stories who died during a break time and didn’t realise it, so has carried on teaching ever since. That could be me one day.

Some of my students (not many, I’ll admit) tell me I am more interesting than other teachers who are all boring and this is nice to hear, even if it is that when talking to said ‘other’ teachers it transpires the same kids said the same thing to them except with order of teachers reversed! Still, I would hate you to think that I was deadly boring. But even I sometimes think an experiment or two wouldn’t go amiss.

So, it was for all this reasoning that there was great excitement that I had got a bunch of magnets out for the Grade eight science class. Magnets, I thought, are perfectly safe short of flinging one into someone’s eye. Even I, with my lack of practical experience, can handle magnets. Though playing with magnets would seem a simple and boring thing to do in a UK high school, here in the Dinajpur region of Bangladesh the resources we have are very limited though they increase with every coming year thanks to helpful donations from many supporters all over the world. And the fact that ‘Uncle Ken’ does not normally touch anything he is suspicious of being ‘scientific’ in purpose (let alone ‘sportslike’) meant that this was a special occasion.

I had just been teaching static electricity and putting forward the concept that opposites attract and like charges repel. We had drawn up diagrams of magnets with North and South poles and how the magnetic fields point towards or away from each other depending on the polarity. I took out two magnets with their poles clearly indicated.

“So, let’s make sure that you have all been paying attention.” I said with that smug air of a teacher who knows he is on safe ground “If I move the North pole of this magnet towards the North pole of the other, what will happen?”

“They will repel, Uncle”

I confirmed that I considered this a most excellent answer and proceeded, slowly to push the two north ends together demonstrating in practice the wisdom of my teaching.

Kerchink went the magnets as both North ends stuck themselves together with such satisfying speed as to leave no one in any doubt that, far from repelling, they had in fact shown every indication of being attracted.

I doubt I could have been more embarrassed had I come to school and too late realised I had forgotten to put any clothes on (well, ok – maybe that one would top it) and the class (including another teacher who was observing me teach to ‘learn’ how I do it) burst into laughter. I, in true Basil Fawlty manner then did it again and again, putting South and South together, watching North and South repel and so on in some vague hope that somehow the result would change. It didn’t.

Having gone from the heights of excitement and confidence, I now plummeted to Eeyorelike depths and realised that my hopes of demonstrating controlled nuclear fusion in the science lab before I leave were irrevocably and permanently put on hold. I could not make even the simple laws of magnetism work in the classroom.

In truth, it was funny and I quickly did what any self-respecting teacher would do. I blamed someone else.

“Oh.” I said. “Someone must have written N and S the wrong way round.” True enough, though one magnet had the letters etched, the other had them written by hand in pen and must have been written in error. The class was pacified and we moved swiftly on. The class departed at the end of the lesson and I was left to ruminate on what had happened.

This, I thought, is why I do not do experiments.

Still, it could have been worse. I could have been teaching hockey to girls.

I Have A Dog

“I once had a dog,

Or should I say,

He once had me.”

With apologies to John Lennon but I could not resist opening with that paraphrase which neatly sums up my situation at the moment here at LAMB.

Bardy is a stray dog who, for some reason known only to him, has decided that our home and family are to be his home and family. This decision of his has not come without problems as well as joys and has left me ruminating over the meaning of pets and the relationship of animals with Bangladeshis.

Bardy himself is something of an unwanted dog. Even his name is not right. Apparently it was said to be his name as a joke by a kid from the school who actually gave another kid’s nickname. Somehow the word got around and it stuck. He is just the most incredibly affectionate and friendly dog who loves the kids at the school and is really pleased to see anyone. Unfortunately, he also goes where there is food and that means hospital areas and the school at snack break time. Though Bardy himself is as soft as anything, where there is one stray dog others are sure to follow and they certainly do.

Bardy’s friendliness to humans becomes submission to other dogs and as a result he gets ‘chewed out’ literally and this means a lot of barking, fighting, growling and teeth baring that scares children and adults alike. And that’s where it all goes wrong and gets confused. Scared people means complaints, complaints mean there is a problem and where there is a problem – at least as far as strays are concerned – it means removal by the only means likely to work. As a dog-lover that scenario upsets me. Bardy is, in a very real sense, living on Death Row. He doesn’t know it, but he could find that one day he wakes up and it is his last - well before his time.

Of course, that is a last resort but the clock is ticking as options continue to run out. No one wants to do the job of getting rid of the strays but at the same time most people want ‘someone’ to do it. As long as it is not them. So I continue to feed Bardy, give him limited shelter if he wants it in the form of our porch which I keep open at night so he can sleep safely, I keep other dogs away and I train him in the hope that deshis here will see that these animals are intelligent and capable. But he is not mine and I can’t protect him all the time. Sometimes, he has turned up bleeding all over from wounds inflicted by other dogs or by men who have beaten him.

I saw him kicked the other day before I could tell the person to stop because he was ‘my dog’ (To say the truth, that I belong to the dog, would just be way too confusing). Interestingly, Bardy barely moved. Didn’t growl, didn’t run away. He just acknowledged he had been kicked and carried on barking at the stray dog that had appeared in the noisy manner that had elicited the kicking in the first place. I found myself comparing this to the lot of many women here – especially the poor ones – who are often beaten, punished, scolded, starved or otherwise harmed by husbands or (as often as not) mothers-in-law. Usually the response, when asked why they put up with it, is the same. “Why would I not? I am poor. I am a woman. This is what happens.” Bardy seemed to say the same thing. “I am kicked. I am a dog. This happens.”

You may well be upset that I have just compared women to dogs but please don’t misunderstand me. Very often the value of a woman is about the same as a dog and certainly less than the value of a cow. A cow for a village man produces milk and meat that can be sold or used by the family. A woman produces nothing. In our first day of living in Bangladesh we were taken to the Language school in Banani where we would spend 3 months learning the language. The woman who was the head there led us into her office. As we spoke I noticed the poster behind her on the wall. In Bangla it said “My wife does nothing” and the picture was of a traditionally dressed married woman with around 20 arms coming out of her, each doing a different task – cooking, cleaning, washing children, milking the cow, cutting corn in the field and so on. But she does nothing. A far cry from the men we often see huddled together by the bank of a river playing cards and gossiping for hours on end.

Our own ayah (who is, in my opinion, one of the most important women I have ever had the honour of knowing and learning from), works with incredible efficiency and speed in our house, often second-guessing what we are thinking of when we forget to actually ask her for some lunch and so on. She goes home after a full day’s work and then does all the work for her own house. On her day off, she tells us she does even more work there and that, in some ways, coming to our house to work is more like a chuti (holiday). We have been to her house many times and it is beautifully kept and maintained despite the difficulties of living in a house made of mud and a country that is wet for most of the time. But I digress.

Life, as you may imagine, out in Dinajpur (in the Northwest of Bangladesh) can be pretty hard for all – man or woman – and working in a hospital environment where people often only come as a last resort (and therefore dying), means that we see it at its worst. Many of the Bideshis (foreigners) here struggle with what they see, working all hours and emotionally being drained of energy. But we only see it and get involved in trying to help. It is the deshis who actually suffer the diseases, the poverty, the malnutrition and the abuse. They do so, usually, stoically and with great honour and though I can never empathise with their plight (to suggest I could would be an insult), I feel proud to have served these amazing people.

Yet, (and please read what I have written again to weigh what I say next properly) of all the things we have seen in two years, all the pain as well as joy, the one image that sticks in my mind and heart is not one of people. This article is about dogs remember.

Whilst still in our 3 months training in Dhaka, my wife and I were walking to the Language school one early morning as the dokanders were setting up their shops on the streets. Suddenly we heard a yapping from the other side of a street. This cute little puppy was waddling around obviously excited by everything it was seeing and running up to anyone who came near the stall that had been set up. We assumed the puppy belonged to the dokander as it seemed very healthy and not mangy and thin like strays normally look here. I can only describe it as looking and acting like the Andrex puppy off the adverts back in the UK. We carried on walking but we were both moved (in truth, Vikki had melted). A little further on we turned back to look at the little thing waddling across the street to a nicely dressed man on the other side who was passing by.

“I wonder if it belongs to anyone” Said Vikki “it’s so cute”.

I thought it must have belonged to someone – the stall owner at least – but we never found out. At that point, the well dressed man, who was grinning but obviously irritated by the animal, started to kick it gently and push it back into the street with his foot. At just that moment a car drove slowly by and he pushed the puppy with his foot straight under the car’s front wheel. Time seemed to freeze as we watched, horrified as the body lay motionless after the car had passed. There was no commotion. Just the young man kicked the body with his foot to make sure it was dead and carried on with his walk to work. I don’t think he had intended to kill the animal, just get rid of it. He still grinned but now with a sheepish “oops” kind of a look.  But he didn’t care either way and nor did any of the dozen or so people milling around at the time who saw what happened. We, however, felt sick in the stomach and though we went to the school for our studies, we could not concentrate. Even now, I feel ill to remember what happened.

When I see Bardy (or any animal) I am reminded of that incident and the strange relationship that Bangladeshis have with animals. Cows and chickens, of course, have great value along with many other animals that provide meat, milk and hide that can be used. Cats and dogs tend not to be valued, but even here in Dinajpur, many poor people keep both and look after them with care and attention. We were once told that Bangladeshis hate cats and certainly one of our friends is terrified of them. But the person who told us was a Bideshi who doesn’t like animals themselves and we have quickly realised that in this country you see what you want to see and you interpret things according to your own values. I’ve heard a lot of rubbish from NGO workers here. The ones I trust, ones who have been here for many, many years and are almost more Bangladeshi than of their own country – they are the ones who will tell you more truthfully that the longer they live here the less they know with certainty. It’s a complex place.

So I can’t tell you if Bangladeshis love animals as pets or not. Some do, some don’t. Some at LAMB are terrified of them and complain asking for them to be ‘got rid of’ in some unspoken manner. Others tell us that they think the Bideshi way of treating them is inhumane and immoral. “They are a life.” one deshi told me “how can I destroy a life?” In an environment set up to save and support life I am surprised more don’t agree. But then I am British. I am an animal lover. Pets are part of my life and always have been. That’s probably why I was so affected by that puppy. It’s probably why Bardy has had such an affect on me here. I left my own dog back in the UK to come here and he was, in some ways, the hardest sacrifice despite leaving home, comfort, family, money, friends and a 100 other things. I left a life behind. I am not sure I can leave this one defenceless.

Bardy, of course, is totally oblivious to all of this and can cause trouble. Another stray dog attempted to get into the church building just before the service a few days ago and, for once, Bardy went crazy. The two bawling animals literally fell into the church causing screams from children, women and men alike. Neither dog was hurt and neither attempted any violence towards a human being but, as the expression goes, the bark was worse than the bite and people were scared. Bardy fully focussed on the other dog who was, without doubt, the enemy. In the end, I went and sorted it out, without violence, with a bucket of water. It is my usual weapon against dogs and always works in driving them from my home, the school and now the church. My hope is that people come to realise that you can get them to go away without hurting them at all. But Bardy’s unusual anger has not helped his own plight.

“Stupid dog” I said to him as I locked up for the night leaving him sleeping on the veranda. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

And then, proving who really is the more stupid, I turned, smiled at him and patted him on the head.

“Goodnight Pal.” I said “See you in the morning. I hope.”