Sarikei Karaoke Okey Cokey

Another birthday has whizzed past.  Fifty-seven and counting.  I spent this one with Sue and a group of her mentor colleagues at a karaoke bar in Sarikei, our nearest largish town, where we go to buy things like yoghurt and margarine, when there is none to be had in Saratok.  You enter the place through an anonymous door in the high street and go up a flight of stairs to a single large room with a bar and some beaten up tables, chairs and sofas. It's the latest happening place where the coolest dudes in town hang.

The attraction for us English speakers is that they have a grainy selection of English language karaoke videos.  These mainly comprise people with 1980s clothes and hairdos singing songs we've never heard of whilst walking around middle European towns.  Still we did manage a passable version of "dream, dream, dream" to the backdrop of a black and white film of the Everly brothers and "don't cry for me Argentina" supported by someone who I would guess was called Elaine von Paige.

Sarikei being a mainly Chinese town there was plenty of beer to be had and most of us ordered lamb and chips for the sheer novelty of seeing it on the menu.  To paraphrase Doctor Johnson "it was like a dog walking on his hind legs. It was not done well; but we were surprised to find it done at all."  Actually the lamb was done well, so well it was almost inedible.

The locals politely applauded and cheered our efforts, then got down to the real business in hand - singing sentimental Chinese pop songs.  Everyone seemed to be having fun and one could recognise the regulars - the ones who dream of making it in the next series of "Sarawak's got talent".

We left early and in my case slightly the worse for wear and made our way back to our cars.  The streets were dark and empty, apart from the odd emaciated cat chewing determinedly on a desiccated fish head.

Happy birthday old man!

Little Visitors

It was Sue's birthday on Tuesday and she got home in the afternoon with leftover cake from a surprise birthday party at one of her schools.  In the evening I had my regular class of nine year-olds and little Ivy brought yet more cake.  Sue cut it and brought slices into the classroom for the kids as we worked on making pictures of "beautiful clean" and "ugly polluted" beaches.  The nine year-olds are a delight to teach and my relationship with them is becoming more and more relaxed as I get used to being around little ones and they get accustomed to being taught by a big pink old man.  I was especially impressed with Qian Hui's "ugly polluted beach", which included a rabbit on its side with its eyes closed, obviously dead and a mysterious lump with some squiggly lines emerging from it, helpfully labelled "smelly vegetable".

Yesterday evening Sue invited our neighbours' children to come into the house and play.  Jasper, Jason and Felicia are charming and full of life, though Shelley seems less content and cries a lot.  They have a different attitude to personal space than we do and for a while tried to get into our house at every opportunity.  Sue manages the situation by setting clear rules about when they can and can't visit us and lets them in to play and draw every now and then.  For a period, every time we came home Jasper, (on the left of picture), would rush up to our gate and ask in perfect English "are you free?"  On one occasion we were watching TV in the evening when we heard a snigger from behind the sofa, only to find three little ones hiding there.  Their delight in the game was so obvious it was hard to be angry with them.  Now they sit and draw contentedly for an hour or so before going to the front door and putting on their shoes and pattering back home.

Once, coming back from doing the shopping, I found a row of tricycles parked on our drive and three tiny pairs of shoes on the steps, which made me smile as I prepared to open the front door and say "hello" to Sue and our little visitors.

Douglas, What is "Beatles"?

One of the problems of teaching English in Sarawak is that almost all of the readily available material is very Europe and US centred.  This even applies to the climate.  Brits are famous for talking about the weather and English textbooks are full of it too.  Whole chapters are devoted to the seasons and the way they change, but then we have a lot of weather to talk about.  Not so in Sarawak, within spitting distance of the Equator.  There are just two seasons here - "rainy" and "rainier", the annual variation in daylight hours is about ten minutes and the annual temperature range is about fifteen degrees, from 25-40c, day and night.  God knows what the locals do for smalltalk.

Earlier this week I was preparing a lesson for a sparky group of nineteen year olds and the textbook had some photos of the Beatles and the fall of the Berlin Wall as teaching aids.  I assumed they'd have heard of the Beatles and I decided to use the material to see what reaction I'd get.  They didn't recognise a photo of the Fab Four, so I wrote "the Beatles" on the whiteboard, which got me the response "Douglas, what is Beatles"? What indeed?  My first reaction was to talk about how famous they were and what an impact they'd had on popular culture, then I thought, "this is an English lesson, not a lesson in Western popular culture", so I just said "they were a pop group in the 1960s, they were very, very famous in Europe and America."  Actually, what more is there to say as far as a group of asian teenagers are concerned?  Interestingly, I had more success with the idea of the Berlin Wall, once we established it was like the DMZ between the two Koreas.

The truth is my students aren't learning English because they have any special respect for or interest in Europe or the States.  They're learning it because English is the lingua franca of business and academia and they need it to get on.  The reason that English is in this position has nothing to do with British culture and values and everything to do with American economic hegemony.  Sometimes, stood in front of these young people I feel like an irrelevant old man wittering on about Britain and the British.  But, mostly I look at them and smile and get on with the job in hand, knowing that the only antidote to irrelevance is to keep changing and that they are helping me at least as much with this as I am helping them to learn English.

So Far Away From Home ….

Life's been a bit of a struggle for the last couple of weeks.  I've had some sort of virus which has given me a sore throat and a feeling of listlessness.  Then last weekend a stomach bug on top of it, which left me immobile for twenty-four hours.  I know it's been bad, because I didn't feel like running for days on end (except for the occasional sprint to the toilet that is).  I finally staggered round the local running track yesterday morning and began to get the feeling of slowly starting to come through something.

While this has been going on I've continued to take my English classes, on the basis that it's marginally easier to carry on than to cancel them.  Mostly they've been fine, although I'm coming to understand why thirteen is regarded as such a difficult age - for sick teachers to cope with at any rate.

Sue has had the same bug whilst working twice as hard as me.  Because of our schedules we hardly seem to see each other during the week.  In fact, it's reached the point where twice recently we have bumped into each other going for lunch at a local cafe quite by accident.

Saratok too is not at its best right now.  The weather is in an even hotter phase and there has been very little rainfall, leaving many local communities in serious danger of running out of water.  Because everything is dry it's also "slash and burn" season, so that often the Sun flares out through a hazy pall and the air smells of burnt vegetation.  The Malays and the Chinese blame the Iban and the Iban blame the Indonesians across the border in Kalimantan.  Food also seems in short supply, there is less and less produce in our local market and the shelves of the supermarket are eerily empty of European staples such as UHT milk and yoghurt.

For the first time since I got here I'm feeling a bit homesick and culture-shocked.  I'm writing this as I listen to Tom Waits sing "Baby, I'm so far away from home …"

You're not wrong Tom.