A Lizard on the Wall Restored My Wanderlust

My first week teaching has been pretty hectic. I am living in a small town in the southern Malaysian of Johor called Chaah, It’s about 300 kilometers from Kuala Lumpur, and about 150 kilometers from Singapore. Everyone I meet reminds me that there’s not much here, that I’ll have to travel a ways to do any shopping or find any tourist attractions. I don’t mind, though. I am staying with the community member who has been working for months to get our center up and running, and who could not be more thrilled to finally have a teacher willing to serve here.

We hold three classes every day, two for primary school and one for secondary school. We have 90 students, give or take (as time goes on our numbers should solidify, but for now we lose and gain one or two every few days). Since all of our students are in school in the morning, our classes don’t start until 3:00, and end at 8:30. The result is that I spend my mornings in town, trying to figure my way around, or at home, grading and planning.

I’m enjoying teaching, but it will take some time to figure out how best to reach students who don’t know any English and cannot understand what I am asking of them. Our youngest class struggles the most, as it is the class where very few students have any grasp of English, with the result that no one in class can translate for me. Hopefully as class goes on, they will get the hang of the worksheets and be able to complete them despite the instructions being in English. For now I have a couple local volunteers who are eager to learn and help, and have been great in explaining tasks in Tamil (all of our students are Indian Malaysian, and all but a few of them attend schools where the language of instruction is Tamil. This is in order to ensure that they maintain their mother tongues, but makes my job even more difficult in that all of our worksheets use Bahasa Melayu as the local language.

Working 10 hours a day, as I am when I account for lesson planning and grading on top of my classes, it is easy, at times, to forget that I am doing more right now than just working. Among the normalcy of day-to-day life, I can forget that I am literally a world away from my home, friends, and family, in a place completely new and exciting. Unlike my trip through Eastern Europe, I have other responsibilities here than just traveling. When I collapse into bed at 9:30 PM after a long day of trying to explain the difference between “is” and “are” to a group of students whose mother tongue not only lacks helping verbs but also fails to differentiate between singular and plural, I sometimes forget how lucky I am to be here, a traveler in a part of the world I have only read stories about.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to remind me of where I am, and how different it is from home. Friday night, I attended Mass with my host family. I have been going with them every Friday night (in Johor, a Muslim state, our weekend is Friday – Saturday, so even Catholic religious services are held on Fridays, rather than the more traditional Sunday morning). It has been a great way to meet the community (granted, a very selective portion of the community, but a portion nonetheless) and immerse myself in Chaah society. Unfortunately, the service is held all in Tamil, a language I can neither read nor speak (though I am working on it – as my students learn English vocabulary words, I have picked up one or two Tamil translations). When I have no more energy to urge my brain to understand the words of the hymns, I will admit, my attention wanders. Occasionally I amuse myself by making faces at those of my students who attend church and cannot help but turn back to meet my eyes. This past Friday, however, a shadow on the wall behind the priest caught my eye. I looked again, and realized that a lizard was darting back and forth across the wall. I thought Look, I am in Malaysia, as far from home as I could possibly be, and there is the proof: there is a lizard on the wall of this church. Instantly my wanderlust was reignited and I remembered that on top of my job, just being in Malaysia is wonderful and exciting.

Shortly after that, a beetle the size of a bird flew into the church, and was subsequently blown around and around the room on the air currents of each of the ceiling fans, so you win some, you lose some, really.