a day in the life of maggie

What does a day in the life of Maggie look like right now?

Around 4:30 am I am woken up by the call to prayer. Some days it is pretty quick and some days it just goes on and on… I have been told that it takes exactly the same amount of time each day and that it is exactly on the same amount of loudness each day. But I strongly disagree. There are times that I look at my cell phone to see the time and know for a fact that it has gone on for an hour and other days that I know for a fact that it has only taken 10 minutes. Either way I go back to sleep until my alarm goes off around 8am. And then the first thing I do is hop on my computer to check to see if Lana, my boss, woke up in the middle of the night to send me emails with lists of things to do. And then I check face book and then scan the news quickly to see if the world has come to an end.
I am really lucky (or manipulative) and at this place not only do I have four walls (verse the curtain wall) and furniture in my room (verses the cardboard boxes I was using) but I also have my own very pink bathroom!!! The drains in the shower don’t work at all but since there is a drain in floor I take a shower using the hand held shower head in the middle of the bathroom. The same way I did it all over east Asia. The last week hasn’t been as hot so I some times take a warm or even hot shower. (no more complaints about the water being too hot (over the summer) or too cold (last spring)… Finally it is the perfect temperature. I then go back into my room to get dressed and pack up my computer to take with me into work. I make sure to eat a solid breakfast because there isn’t going to be anything else until 4 or 5 pm to eat during Ramadan. Usually we all set off to work together, Maureen, Tony, Jess and I. Both Sean and Lou have gone in earlier.
At work right now I am working on a variety of projects.

The sorting of the student’s text books needed to be finished but the room was locked and I didn’t know who or where the key was. Also I had gone to tel aviv to smuggle last box of books into the city but there were still other books missing.

Lana (my boss) had been to the British council and found out about a program that might be able to save the future of the school… away for us to get accredited through the british system. So she asked me to figure out a way to apply to their accrditation process and to call them and get the details. It was another project I was excited to do but the computer lab was locked and the only guy with the key to it was going to be at the kindergarten all day. And, the internet was semi-down and taking a very long time to load on my laptop. So I needed this was another project that hit a temporary dead end and I was off to work on another project.

I also needed to work on finishing the brochure for the community center I am trying to start. The hold up on this project were that I didn’t know which classes had been approved and the details of them. I figured it was okay since I could at least work on the layout for them…. But the computer I needed to use was in the locked computer lab. I have to use that particular one since it is the only one hooked up to the special printer we have to print them and if I work on it on my computer the alignment gets messed up since this is a mac and the school uses PCs. So I spent 15 minutes making traditional paper mock ups of what I wanted it to look like and put those in my bag for when Ahmad the computer teacher comes back and lets me in the lab. I don’t have where else to put stuff since I currently have no desk. During the summer I had a desk in the office because I was the director of the summer program. Once that was over the desk was moved out faster than I could believe. I am not a regular teacher so I don’t have a classroom and there isn’t a teachers office yet but even then, I don’t know that I will get a desk in there either since the community center doesn’t fall under any existing umbrellas. So for now I carry everything in a computer bag on my shoulder. During the day I usually find a student desk in a quiet room to work or I sit in the lobby in the admin office where the children who are sent to the principals office are sent to sit and wait.
Finally I decide to go to lana’s office (my boss) to see if she has any projects or has a clue to when the people with the keys to the different rooms are coming in.
She is hard at work on preparing a presentation for the board about the school budget. So we sit down and work out the community center budget. Half way through our meeting the school psychologist from the ministry of education comes in to have a meeting with Lana. So I am asked to finish the budget myself and they go to another office behind a locked door to have a meeting. Honestly 45 seconds after Lana steps out of the office her computer completely freezes so much so that even Control+alt+delete doesn’t work and I have to unplug it to get it to restart. Of course I don’t have Lana’s password to get back to the program and I don’t have the numbers to re write the presentation on a different computer. I try to go and knock on the door but Key Ahmad (as we call him) physically refrains from letting me knock. So I check the status on all the other tasks that I have started that morning to see if there is any progress to the roadblocks and nothing has quite materialized. The school secretary assures me that I should just wait a few more minutes… so while I wait to wonder over to another classrooms of one of the other teachers.
This teacher, L, has just arrived about two weeks before. He is a super experienced teacher from America. He has taught elementary school in the Berkley area for 20 years but Palestine isn’t California. And he is having a seriously hard time adjusting to everything. On demographics along he is the target candidate for having a melt down. He is 60, recently divorced and broke. Except for a couple to short trips to Europe on a tour he has never done any traveling or living outside of America. Life here is too different and hard for someone like him to survive much less thrive. I am not trying to be an agest but I have seen from my vast experience that people like him need routine and structure and things to work in just a certain way. None of the above exists in places like Palestine. Also at school the work of EFL, especially the world of teaching at an immersion school is so different than that of teaching at a school in America that anyone less than completely flexible will go crazy. We don’t have crayons or construction paper or zip lock bags. There are no sentence strips or pocket charts. If you want those you have to make them. There are no teacher supply stores. A stationary store has little beyond paper, notebooks and pencils.
Even the educational theories are different here. How ESL is taught in American classrooms seems archaic to an EFL teacher. International ESL teachers are the guinea pigs for every new theory.
Needless to say Lou was cracking and Lana was trying to decide to let him go or not. So I went to see what all the fuss was about. He had spent the last two weeks writing hundreds and hundreds of words, complex words on posters and hung them all over the room. The class that he was going to teach is smart but has one of the lowest levels of English in the school. They are still learning site words, not three syllable words. Plus there were no pictures or definitions or any context clues for the kids to identify these words. All they were going to see was a bunch of English on the walls and then ignore it. He also had a dozen political slogans written out and taped up all over the rooms. He is one of the teachers who actually knows what is going on here but doesn’t seem to understand the very very fine tightrope we are walking on here. Telling kids not to throw rocks is still very controversial. (that was my project last year) but telling them to start a revolution was putting all of us internationals in danger. He was not receptive to any of my mild suggestions that he might want to rethink the words…. He wanted to get into a huge argument with me about it and how it follows all the educational theorist suggestions. I told him I wasn’t there to argue with him but he might want to investigate the difference between ESL and EFL and then I gave him a long list of linguist and educators in the field who would explain to him what an immersion school is all about. The entire conversation he kept threatening to quit. That he couldn’t work under these conditions After that experience, I couldn’t agree with the admin more that it was time for him to go.
So I went back to the office to see if Lana’s meeting was over and it wasn’t but the two rooms down stairs were finally open so I got to work on those projects and got stuck on more roadblocks…. Eventually I just went round and round between the projects and started making real head way. When Lana called me up to the office to finish the budget at which point I found out that they were going to fire L. I was asked if I would be willing to take over his classes until a replacement would be found. I said I was willing but that I would start working on it until it was official and they had told him. By the time we did all of that it was 4 pm and time to walk home.
On the way home we stopped at a bakery to buy fresh pita and then a little shop to by some hummus to eat for lunch. I am not actually fasting for Ramadan, but I feel akward eating at school while everyone else is fasting so by the time I got home I was weak from hunger. We sat around eating for a while before noticing the electricity was out. At first I figured it was just a power outage but after an hour it hadn’t come back on. I then remembered that the meter downstairs had been beeping for the past couple of days signaling it was time to go and pay the electric company some more money. I was too tired in every way to go so I asked/ begged Sean to go for me…. But we needed to gather some money for him to pay.
The school officially pays for our electricity but we have to pay it out of our pocket and then get reimbursed. After quickly checking with all the other teachers we realized as a house hold we had less than 200 NIS (50$) to live on for the next week. We needed to pay at least 100 NIS (25$) to get the power turned back on. Pathetically we just didn’t have it. So I called Lana and told her the problem. She told me she would send her taxi driver over with some money to pick Sean up to take him to the place to pay. He did that and came back and we waited and waited for it to come back on. But it didn’t. so I called lana who had no idea what to do. She asked me who I thought she should call and I told her Ola (our other boss, the head of academics) had helped me with problems like this before. So we called Ola who called the power company who said they would try to track down their electrician to come to the house. But since we don’t have address here only landmarks I needed to go and sit next to the pharmacy next door (the landmark) and wit for him, he would look for the adjanab (foreigner). Amazingly 15 minutes later he showed up and started working on the problem. The meter was broken.
An hour later the problem was fixed.
It is always something. The day before we didn’t have gas for the stove.
The day before that the front gate was broken. And so on and so forth.

I was exhausted and ready to go to bed at this point but it was only 7pm. My head was killing me so I took a nap only to be woken up by Maureen, (the sixty-seven year old teacher from South Africa) who wanted to know where something was.

I eventually got up a few minutes later to have to deal with the drama about L. He was causing problem and was trying to figure out where he was going to go next and how to get there. Etc…

It just never ends….

I got on line with my computer and closed the door to my room and turned the light off to hide…. Eventually I was tired enough to go to sleep so I turned off the light and then sat there for hours waiting to fall asleep.

There you have it, a day in the life of Maggie. Kinda boring… never the same…