December has been a weird month for Ampangan Woh. Most of the villagers returned to their farms or to the village deeper in the jungle for the school holidays – which are about 6 weeks long – so the whole place has been rather empty since I returned from New Zealand at the end of November. I’ve been staying in the house with one of the daughters (Wak Nani, the 20-year-old). Her older sister, Teri, who lives up the mountain a bit, has been staying with us for most of the time with her family (husband, Bah Rudy; 13-year-old son, Ejai; 6-year-old-son, Edai), although they have been back and forth to the farm as well. The rest of the family has popped back in twice in the last 6 weeks, staying only one or two days to replenish rice and other supplies.
Since more than half of the students are away, classes have
been at something of a standstill. We can’t really move on with only two to
five students in class on a given day, so we’ve been doing extra exercises,
review games, etc. That worked for the first two weeks, but after six, we’re
ready to do something real. My beginner classes have been doing vocabulary:
five new words every class, so they’ll be pretty far ahead of their classmates
when they return, but at least no one will have missed essential grammar. My
advanced classes have been playing games, building vocabulary, practicing verb
tenses, and reading fairy tales. They got a real kick out of Little Red Riding
Hood, although are still unclear about how the girl and her grandmother escaped
from the wolf’s belly. I said “it’s a children’s story, so they have to be
safe,” but I guess no one really bought that. They liked the idea of “all the
better to eat you with my dear!” and
that has become common dinner table talk.
My kids’ class has been the most fun. Even though only two
of the students from that class are still in the village, we’ve been doing
snow-themed crafts, which have attracted even older students and younger kids
to fill up the class. The first thing we did was make play-dough to build
snowmen. The power went out in the middle of mixing the flour so it became
extremely messy, but it was very fun. I asked them if they knew what snowmen
were. No one did, so I tried to explain in Bahasa. One of the girls interrupted
me, “oh, teacher! Like Let it Go!” and class turned into a sing-along. Our next
craft was making paper snowflakes, which are now hanging in our classroom as
wintery decorations. Last week, I had all the students make books, illustrating
a story about building a snowman. We had cotton balls, water colors, colored
pencils, and glitter, and it kept everyone busy for a good 2 hours, even though
our class is officially only an hour long.
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| Kids making play dough to use for building snowmen |
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| Older students join in making play dough with the kids class... because no one is too old for play dough! |
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| Snowflake artists, with their creations |
In retrospect, it’s been a fun
month, just hanging out with the few people who are around. We’ve been cooking
a lot – making oatmeal cookies (on the stove… I think they were more like hot
oatmeal dough, but they were delicious nonetheless), Malaysian doughnuts
(essentially fried flour and water, food when there’s no rice left and no one
who can drive a motorcycle is around to go and buy some), and grilled cheese
(devoured in seconds by people who had never eaten cheese before). We’ve had a
little too much downtime (I’ve read a little too much War and Peace) and things have been a little boring at times. It
doesn’t help that it’s been raining just about all day every day so even going
to the river is out of the question. I’m looking forward to my two-week
Christmas break and my trip to Sri Lanka. When I return in January everyone
should be back in Ampangan Woh, so our classes should be able to resume as
normal… then I’ll have only two more months in the village, and there should be
some exciting things coming up!
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| At least I have this most Christmasy picture. |
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