A Day in the Life of a Senior English Language Fellow

Some days I look back on the events of the day and ask myself “What the hell just happened?” or "How would I ever describe this chaos to my friends and colleagues?" or “Am I getting too used to the way things are done in India?” or “Is living in another culture getting to me?”.  I can usually answer YES to at least a couple of the questions, so I think it’s a good idea for my readers to get a little context to the head shaking that accompanies many a day’s reflection.

 Today was the first day of a 5-day workshop outside of my city, outside of my territory as it were.  I was not in charge of executing all the preplanning we had done, but I was assured that the cite coordinator had everything arranged: tables, chairs, whiteboards, adequate space, projector, housing arrangements.  Maybe in another universe that happened.

 Upon arrival I was ushered into a huge ampli-theatre with one stationary continuous oval-shaped desk with microphones at each fixed chair, much like the general assembly at the United Nations, and about that size.  In the middle of the room were 30 lawn chairs placed around child-sized tables, about 20” by 20”, which was supposed to be adequate for 4 people’s materials and space to write. No one thought it was odd at all that only one notebook would fit on it.

When I explained this wasn’t going to work because the cavernous space, which was NOT air conditioned,  (Yes, it was 100 degrees today) had about a dozen noisy whirling fans moving the dust and heat around and making it impossible to hear anyone more than 5 feet away.  The master teachers thought it would work out, somehow, but I stood fast and asked to see other rooms.  One man literally took off running and asked me to follow him, which I did.  I was shown some awful rooms, which he knew wouldn’t work but I thought he figured he would wear me out. Finally, I was shown another room about half the size of the first, but it had no projector, which we needed.  I asked if we couldn’t get a portable projector from someone (this was a college campus) but I got 3 answers in this order:  1.  We only have 2 projectors on the entire campus, and they are fixed to the ceilings and in the physics labs (I'd just seen on in the lecture hall!), 2.  We have lots of portable projectors, but they have to be commissioned for use in writing at least a week before use, and 3.  There was no telling how many projectors were on the campus, but they had no authority to get one.  That’s when I cornered the fellow most likely to do something  (the  runner) and told him I would take this less-than-perfect room if he could bring me a projector in 5 minutes.  He quickly agreed, and took off running to fetch it, because most rooms were full to capacity because it is that most hallowed and elongated times in the Indian education system, “Exam period”.  This illusive beast has been the source of many of my curses over the last few months, because it seems that India tests its students for even longer than it actually teaches them.  Again, it’s a tricky concept because everyone gives different answers when I ask exactly when is this period?  Some say it really starts in Feb, when students no longer attend their college lectures but prefer to start “mugging”  [cramming].  Others say it starts the first week of March, but everyone agrees that nothing useful will happen in April because of exams, nor the first week in May.  Then they go on vacation.

Anyway, back to the battle at hand. I secured the projector, then asked the woman in charge of bringing the laptop to set it up.  She didn’t know how, so I took it and was connecting it when I noticed the wallpaper image for her laptop:  it was of a buxom woman in a revealing camouflage halter top, shorts too short for her bum by half, and a large grin and even larger automatic rifle in her hands which was pointed directly at me.  Something straight out of an Iowa Truck-stop greeting card. After I turned around and looked at this meek, retiring, conservative older woman and wondered how in God’s earth that got on her laptop, I explained I couldn’t have that showing between our Powerpoint presentations so she needed to change it.  She didn’t know how, so I showed her and she was quite happy to discover that tulips can also greet a person opening her computer.

Next came the balancing act of trying to make the portable whiteboard high enough that we could write on it, and not have to be on hands and knees to do it.  During the course of this trial and error, at least 7 people got involved, and had at least that many opinions and shouting voices.  After about 5 minutes I called that to a halt and turned it on its side.

Now people were arriving and I found out that the coordinator had not put the materials I had so painstakingly made and had reproduced into the 3 ring binders, but just shoved the papers (about 45 pages per packet times 35 packets) in a large plastic sack and just hoped they would somehow magically stay in order.  That’s when I walked outside to take a minute to roll my eyes and curse a lot to myself.  That seemed to help, so I went back in.  I asked 3 of the master trainers to start sorting out the pages and tried to get a system organized so they could have an assembly line, but it was like trying to make a drill team out of cats; they simply refused to have order take over their chaos.  They seemed to all have a screwy system and everyone refused to listen to each other.  I had to walk away from that one because I couldn’t get a word in edgewise and was no match for the expert level opinion-givers. It took them about 2 hours in the afternoon to sort out the hundreds of extra sets.

I asked if there was such a thing as a projector screen, and one magically appeared, but when the 3 men  attempted to open it, we were greeted by a loud ripping sound, so that one was discarded and they went to get another.  No one was very impressed by the rip except me, so I just shrugged and stepped over it. [I should add that a university I did a workshop at in January had a projector screen that was filled with equations because someone had used a permanent marker on it.  And it was still up on the wall two months later when I came back for another workshop.  True story.]

During this mayhem, the site coordinator, who was supposed to have arranged all this long before today, was unsurprisingly unable to be reached.  When she did show up, about an hour late, she was carrying bouquets of flowers which she wanted to use for an opening ceremony I had already put the kaybosh on when asked about it earlier in the week.  The woman doesn’t do anything that was on the list we sent, but she gets flowers for an induction ceremony we didn’t want.  Oh, and she forgot to order breakfast for the master trainers who were staying at the hostel on campus, so they hadn’t eaten anything. 

We started 30 minutes late, and even before we had taught a minute I was in a deep sweat, thoroughly disheveled, filthy from cleaning dust off of chairs, and exhausted. Somehow, I sucked in a large breath and greeted everyone and we were off! No one seemed to think perhaps we should reflect on what a **** show the 90 minutes of set-up were and take a pledge to never go through that again.  That’s the part that really bothered me, because I knew that next Monday I’d be dancing the same Chaos Tango, only in another dance hall with a different set of partners.  Incredible India indeed.

One point of levity was the huge portraits of some of the Maharajas of Udaipur (city I'm in) which covered the walls around our teaching area.  These men in large skirts with odd facial hair and battle gear did make me smile a little.  

Oh, and this blog seems a good one to remind my readers that these opinions are just mine, and don't belong to Dept of State or anyone else but me.