You’re lucky I’m writing this, I haven’t really got the time. Well, I have, but I’m knackered and can’t really be bothered. The last two weeks have flown by, the lazy and sometimes empty days of the summer holidays seem ages ago and suddenly I’m up to my neck in it. Welcome to school life, Mr Newham.
My daily routine goes something like this:
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| Marlie Mount shops, 6.45am |
: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button until 5.40, when I swear inwardly and get up to boil water on the stove to make tea and porridge. Pack bags, eat breakfast sat on the front doorstep, then shower (some days outside down at the bottom of the yard under an ackee tree). Arrive at school, sweating, at . Plug in laptop and a fan and spend next hour and three quarters on the internet and doing various admin jobs round the office.
: First lesson of the day. Usually my least enthusiastic of the day – I still haven’t really woken up properly yet and I don’t really want to be bothered with a bunch of noisy, wide-awake kids who insist on constantly pushing the boundaries of defiance until eventually you just have to scream at the little bastards to shut up and stand in line or they’re going straight back to their classroom. I do most of my shouting first thing in the morning, without swearing, of course.
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| Kizzee, Alex, Chad and Ryan ready for school |
Assuming the class gets half way to listening to what I say in between mimicking my accent (always an appalling mockney whine) and wrestling with eachother, the game we play usually puts me in a better mood. The kids get very into it - last week we had a game where one girl was left on her own for her team against five on the other in a knockout scenario where players have to run to collect tennis balls and throw them at cricket stumps before the other person hits them. By the time she had three of her opponents out, her teammates were giving her a full-on cheerleading routine: ‘Give me an ‘A’, (we got an ‘A’), Give me an ‘M’ (we got a ‘M’), Give me an ‘O’ (we got an ‘O’, Give me a ‘Y’ (we got a ‘Y’)’. Most of this week we played Cops and Robbers, with one team having to run to ‘rob’ the tennis balls and the other having to chase them and catch them. I had to tell off one boy in Grade Three today for shouting at the opposite team ‘Yo pussy-hole po-lice, me a shoot you up, Bop! Bop! Bop!’
: Lunch break for the morning shift kids. It’s already hot out on the playing field and I pretty much have to down a pint of water after every lesson. Once I’ve recovered a bit, I talk to the kids, sometimes running into Ryan who is liable to lose his lunch money and need help buying his patty (at the end of one lunch break last week he ran past me almost in tears because the bell had gone and he hadn’t eaten yet – he’d run straight out onto the field to play and forgotten to buy his lunch). I also try to buy bulla, which is something of a school cult. Bulla is a flatish round heavy cake, and the school sells bags of 10 of them for $30 (about 20p), including a free sack of bag juice or milk. I have no idea how or why the school does this, all I know is that the cake, plus rock cakes and buns, are donated by some company or other and that the trade is legendary. Everyone in the yard badgers me to buy them some, and then I’ll get parents at school begging me to get a sack for them. But buying bulla is a competitive business – crowds of parents and afternoon shift students turn up to try and get some, but the daily supply is regularly done by the time the staff get through. Some days the number we can buy is rationed, as we’re all buying for friends too, and sometimes I miss out completely if they open up early and I’m still in my lesson. But needless to say, bulla’s been making me fulla. |
| Grade 5 PE |
: In the half hour between the end of lunch and the next PE class, I usually do very little, except maybe get pestered by a lad called Daniel who has decided I’m his friend. He is on the afternoon shift and comes in early for football training (they have to split that, too, and not very successfully – a handful of boys come in each morning, while about 30 boys stay after school to train in the afternoons), then has nothing to do, so talks at me. I don’t mind so much, I just don’t understand half of what he says. The lesson can be lively as it is the last one of the morning shift and the kids are already thinking of home time. It is also getting steadily hotter – last week especially was killer – so I’m well ready for morning school to finish so I can eat last night’s leftovers for lunch and cool down a while.
: First of back-to-back lessons. Starting to flag a little physically. I’m mentally buoyed by the fact that I’m now well in the groove and only have to shout, cajole, manipulate and threaten my way through the same lesson twice more and I can go home. Loading up on water and preparing to sweat it out, I actually enjoy these lessons more than the morning ones, maybe because I get more of a chance to lead the class as Mr Thomas also oversees football training (I haven’t had any involvement in the football team yet, I get the feeling it is very much Mr Thomas' baby, he played himself at top level in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands and he takes it seriously. The boys are run and drilled hard physically – the first session I watched he had them playing one-on-one on a big pitch, making them run and chase until neither player could hardly move, then at the end he told them that was to show them that football was a team game and no individual alone could ever manage).
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| Me, Kashawn, Alex and Austin |
I feel comfortable handling the classes and I’ve already taken six or seven on my own, including a full day when Mr Thompson wasn’t in school. It is a bit harder for me to control a class than the teachers, I guess a combination of me ‘talking funny’, the sheer novelty of having someone from foreign taking their class and the fact that I’m new and they’re testing me. But they’re generally no problem, they’re boisterous because they’re out on the field wanting to have fun. And even if they laugh at me and they pretend they don’t understand me so they can disobey me, they love me for being a novelty. If they ask if I’m taking their class and I say yes, they all cheer and want to hug me. One Grade 3 class today started chanting ‘White Man! White Man!’ as they saw me walking over the field to take their class.
: End of the day for me, straight home for a cup of tea. It’s not like I can just flake out and relax, though – most days I seem to have something that needs doing, laundry, shopping, fetching money, filling the water tank, writing, doing work from school for Cubs and the adult learning programme. I’ve also been helping Stone get his visa to go to England Leeds and Bradford should be some experience for him, and I’ve warned him he’ll need to buy a coat.
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| Ryan and Kashawn |
Everything Is Possible, the charity which arranged my trip here, has got busy with sending and hosting volunteers to and from Jamaica
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| Coach Newham in action |
: Starts to get dark, which is usually when I start to think about cooking, after I’ve sat outside listening to the Live at 5.45 news on Irie FM and watched the sunset. I’ve pretty much gone fully native as far as food goes, everything I cook now is pretty standard Jamaican fare (except for spag bol) – spicy steamed cabbage or calallo, dumplings, yam, red pea soup, curried veg, stewed veggie chunks, rice. Avocados are in season at the moment and I must eat ‘pear’ every day, often with bulla as is the Jamaican way. Breadfruit is also getting ripe, and to my surprise, it starts to go sweet and soft, kind of the way a green banana goes from being a starchy, tough food stuff to a sweet fruit. Breadfruit is popular because it is big and abundant and they get roasted in a fire until they’re black on the outside and the flesh is then cut up and fried.
By the time I’ve cooked and eaten it is usually getting on for and I’m starting to think that bed might be a good idea. I’ll usually sit in the yard for a while to cool off as it gets red hot cooking, then move back inside when I can’t stand the mosquitos biting anymore, to read, listen to music or play with the four-string guitar I still have from school.
The guitar got some use this week when I decided to use it to try and make the Cubs meeting a bit more interesting than last weeks, when I spent most of the hour trying to stall the boys who had turned up as we waited for the teacher who runs the pack, Mrs Frith. She ended up being tied up in a meeting the whole time and is likely to be so every week as the only time we can get boys from both shifts together during school time is on a Friday when the teachers have their planning session between 11am and 1pm. That pretty much means that I won’t be just helping out with Cubs, I’ll be running the show, which will be interesting as I don’t really know what I’m meant to be doing, especially when it comes to badges and stuff.
Anyway, as the Cubs motto goes, I will do my best, and as Mrs Frith gets the pack singing songs I decided to learn a couple on guitar for this week’s meeting, a hymn they always sing called Keep In Me A Clean Heart, and 10 Green Bottles. What I hadn’t figured on was the fact that young kids, and boys especially, are nervous about singing in public in case they look and sound like an idiot in front of their friends, and need quite a bit of leading and encouragement. So there I found myself, crouched next to the half-built science room where we were holding the meeting, strumming my guitar and belting out a hymn I’d heard for the first time the day before and a kids’ song, feeling slightly self-conscious, especially as it took until half way through 10 Green Bottles for most of the boys to raise anything more than a murmur. But looking stupid or not, it attracted attention, and the 8 boys who came at the start of the meeting soon swelled to near double that number as more came wandering over asking what was happening and could they join in. When I got a ball out to start playing some games more inevitably decided they wanted to be a part of it, and even if some of those have no intention of joining the pack properly, by the end I’d taken down a page of new names from boys who said they’d come back next week, and if in the coming weeks I can establish a group of 15 or 20 boys who sign up properly and keep coming every week, and maybe get most of them through their Membership Badge, I think it will be a job well done. I’m just slightly concerned I might have to teach them to march before so they can attend a big Cubs parade in Kingston
Apart from school I haven’t done a great deal, and should really think about using my remaining weekends a little more productively and try to see some more of the island. I have been out a couple of times, last week to a Nine Night, which is the Jamaican equivalent of a wake but held the night before a funeral at the ‘Dead Yard’, or yard where the deceased person lived. This one was up at one of the plush houses on the hill heading up to Marlie Mount school, and was a big party, although I was told it wasn’t huge for a Nine Night by any means. There was a live band, a free bar (which was drunk dry pretty early), a massive sound system and people spilling out of the yard and filling the road outside. I got talking to the dead lady’s best friend, who had flown over from Lambeth with her family and recognized my accent. When I was walking past the house the following Monday, from nowhere a screeching cockney voice shattered the silence – ‘I facking told you, what did I facking tell you?!’ I hung my head in shame that that’s how the kids at school think I sound.
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| Kizzee and birthday pic for Daisy |
Last weekend I also struck on the idea of getting the Mighty Gully kids to make cards or posters to send for Daisy for her birthday, which is on Tuesday this week (before I flew out to Jamaica, not really thinking about how long a journey it is, I had been thinking about flying back this weekend to see Daisy, but considering that with the time difference it would easily take me 24 hours to get back to Leeds, I realized it wasn’t really practical). I ended up buying a colouring book full of faeries and some crayons and felt tip pens and asking each of the kids to make her a picture. My problem then was how to get them to her – they wouldn’t make it in time in the post, so I thought about designing them into a poster to send to my mum and dad, who could then get it printed out. But then I haven’t got any decent page design software with me, so in the end I’ve taken photos of all the kids holding their pictures and turned it into a slide show, with some music and little video clips and stuff. I just hope I can get the file compressed and e-mailed over to her. Anyway, happy birthday Daisy for Tuesday, I can’t believe you’re five already, I love you lots and I can’t wait to see you again in time Christmas xxx
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