Zonas! Trouble at Tibati

Angie peacin' out on a Friday.

 In my relatively short stint in the working world, I’ve witnessed a few preteen moments I didn’t think I would experience until fatherhood. From a kid wetting his pants during class to girls heartbroken by this month’s boyfriend, I’ve had to handle quite a few situations on the fly, and with varying degrees of success. When I was helping at a school in Viña del Mar during my semester abroad in Chile, there was a girl with her hands down the skirt of her school uniform, evidently deciding that English was a good class to begin exploring her body. With no actual teacher nearby, I remember telling everyone to stand up and stretch since it had been a long day of classes. I then remember thinking “those little buggers listened, problem averted, I am a pro.”   

I’ve also seen some beautiful moments from those same students. I remember one day just this year that a boy from my former homeroom was waiting outside my current homeroom with a nervous look on his face. I had just opened the door to let everyone out after we sang happy birthday to the youngest girl of the grade. I asked him what was up, and he said he was waiting for the birthday girl to exit. I saw a letter folded in his sweating hands as he nervously tried to look past me. Naturally, I let the birthday girl leave last so that our shy Romeo wouldn’t have an audience.  

            The point is that I’ve been involved in my fair share of ups and downs so far. So when a sixth grade girl came up to me during class recently and asked me to take away all sharp objects from the girl next to her, my confusion turned to unnoticed panic when her reply was that the girl, we’ll call her girl A, was cutting herself. Now I know very little about cutting and was never around it growing up (that I know of), though I understand it to be a form of self-mutilation usually due to depression or other emotional instability in teenagers. Since I wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed, I let the other girls sitting around girl A take control. We had been taking turns reading in English, so I had girl A get up and read in front of the class. While she was focused on differentiating soft T’s versus sharp T’s, her friends were passing me all the sharp objects from girl A’s desk. After finishing her reading she returned to find an empty desk, but didn’t voice any complaints. After selecting the next reader, I turned to see on of her friends holding her hand across the aisle of lined desks. My slow, male mind thought, that’s nice. But after about ten minutes, girl A’s friend still had her hand clasped. And by the time class ended, I realized that her friend had held her hand the whole class so that she wouldn’t be able to cause any more damage to herself. Not only had her friend removed all ways of harming herself, but she managed to both prevent her friend from using any other object AND let her know that she was loved. All by simply holding her hand. I don’t know that I had ever seen such a powerfully beautiful moment up until that point in my teaching career. 

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It’s been an admittedly emotional couple of weeks down here at the Tibati school. Wilmer, the teacher I first helped when I showed up in Colombia, got engaged to a girl from Michigan. They met at a Bible camp in Missouri almost a decade ago and kept in contact, especially when her family moved to Colombia. He proposed to her at a restaurant overlooking the city skyline. What a romantic. Another joyous discovery event was discovering my good friend Alex is going to be a father this fall! When he told me, it was probably the happiest I’d been since my brother’s wedding. 

Alex, with his wife, Fernanda, and soon to be child.

But I had to reign in the outburst, since at that time he hadn’t yet told any of the other teachers. Later in the week, he showed us all a picture of him and his wife wearing a shirt with “1+1 = 3”, the numbers represented by stick figures. The only downside is the little tike’ll come into the world when uncle JJ is no longer around. But still, I’m very excited for my friend to start of a family of his own.

            Celebrations of any sort have unfortunately been tempered by the school going through some changes. For some reason, they decided to change homeroom directors midway through the trimester. I was not excited about the change, to say the least. I had known the kids in my current homeroom of 7A since they first walked through the school’s gates at the beginning of last year. I had even moved some over from the other seventh grade before the year began because I knew they fit with how I ran a homeroom (it should probably be noted that moving kids around to different homerooms is normal at our school, to keep a similar number of boys and girls, and to keep the trouble makers separated). So, even though I would still be their English teacher, it was hard to see some students visibly distraught that I was moving across the courtyard. I imagine there were some that were happy to see me go, too. But while the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, I was given a warm welcome and applause upon entering my new homeroom of 8A. Last year, as seventh graders, these kids were the bane of any teachers’ attempts to educate. But during prayer, when we were giving thanks for something, one of the basketball players, Juan Pablo, said he was thankful to have me as a homeroom director. First of all, what a suck up. Second, it totally worked. Sometimes, a benefit of teaching is simply having a student validate that you’re not a total asshole. Life is about small victories, and I sure know how to enjoy them.

           

8A

But some changes have yet to prove as fruitful. A fortnight ago, the prior of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota, the abbey that founded Tibati here in Bogota, came for a visitation, accompanied by a monk from a different Abbey in Belmont, North Carolina, who could translate for him. Brother Michael and Father Elias, respectively, came as part of a regular monastic check up, making sure our prayer books were well worn and our farts smelled like incense. In general they just needed to make sure the monastery was functioning in the way it was intended and that we had our ducks in a row. This involved them chatting with each member of the monastery individually, examining the processes the monastery goes through to initiate a new member, visiting the schools they’ve founded and evaluating them as well, etc. Simultaneously, apparently, Colegio San Benito was also under review from Colombia’s department of education. I’m not sure if the timing was coincidence or planned, but we teachers were soon informed that our principal, Father Nicolas, was under review as well, for his role as principal. This, however, according to teachers who have been here quite a while, is not normal. And when the school accountant became involved in the private discussions that were had, we assumed it had to have something to do with the school’s finances.

            Days went by. Nick was still nowhere to be seen around school. Teachers began to ask us volunteers about him since we ate and prayed with him back at the monastery. But he hadn’t confided anything in us. One night, as we filed into the dining room after prayer, I made a beeline for the chair next to him. Even if he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about what was going on, I at least wanted him to know that I was on his side. Along with most everybody else at the school, I was a little lost as to where the school was headed. Because there were also to be elections for a new prior down here in Bogota, I thought that he was in the running, and that being elected would mean he wouldn’t have time to work at San Benito anymore. I was confused, but for some reason I thought that conspicuously sitting by him would at least let him know I supported him, whatever was happening. Sure enough, his eyes lit up in a smile and he slammed a big left mitt across my shoulder. Father Nick’s approval. We ate dinner, told jokes, laughed. He seemed as jolly as ever. After dinner, I ran into him on my way out of the laundry room with my clothes freshly ironed. He had a Falabela shopping bag in his hand, smiled and asked if I was going to be doing anymore traveling soon.

At lunch the next day, I sat with Alex away from the rest of the teachers and told him Nick seemed fine. Alex, on the other hand, with tears welling in his eyes, said, “No, J, he left the monastery this morning. He stayed at my house last night before catching a bus back to Medellin.” I couldn’t remember a time I was left so dumbfounded.

It didn’t take long for word to spread around the school. The next day monks came to chat, first with teachers, then with students in assembly. In both instances, we were told “sometimes in monastic reviews, monks get moved around in their positions so as not to become static in their service, and that was why Father Nicolas has been removed from his post, and father Manuel will be the interim director of the school. Nicolas is still a monk and still a member of our community. But often when leadership is changed the old leader will leave for a time so that the new leader can establish his way of leadership.” Blah, blah, blah was all I could think as I stood on stage reluctantly translating this for our students, my words undoubtedly as hollow as my thoughts at that point. We were still missing the why! We get it, monastic processes, service, removed, blah blah. But why was he removed? And did this have to do with the ministry of education’s inspections as well?

In my determination to know more, I asked Father Philip, the current prior, to chat after dinner. As we began our laps around the courtyard, I was hopeful for information. Philip is a fellow Midwesterner, and would tell it like it is. I was not disappointed. I soon found out that there are those at school who feel Nicolas wasn’t doing his job properly. Since they were under review anyway, things were examined closer. Colegio San Benito is not a wealthy school. And apparently, it was felt that Nicolas was spending too much of funding on the aesthetics of the school; that he was too worried about how it looked. It was also felt that he had been delegating too many tasks and information to people who shouldn’t be handling such information. That still wasn’t incredibly specific, but it helped explain things a little bit.

In all this administrative mess, I can’t help but think of how the students must feel. I remember when I was in high school and there was a similar shuffle. There was a new administration and some good teachers, mainly Johnson and Dwyer for me, were removed. What it did was leave me a little disillusioned and simply ready to leave the mess and graduate. Over the years that followed there seemed to be a domino affect of other teachers leaving the school or retiring coincidentally soon after regime changes. Down here in Bogota, similar events have occurred. On Friday, the music teacher, Daniel, said he would be leaving by the end of April. He cited being exhausted, and that he’s thought about leaving for a while now. This came as pretty devastating news to everyone. He’s one of the most well liked teachers, by both students and his colleagues. And while I’m sure he has indeed thought about leaving for a while, it’s the mess at the school that I’m certain has pushed his decision to leaving in the middle of the year.

My main concern is the environment of the school. It’s not good for the teachers to be worrying about the next domino to fall, and I definitely don’t want the students to feel disconnected from their school, a place that should be like a second home. Father Nicolas was like a real father to many, including my friend Alex. I mentioned that news about his being a father soon being one of my happier moments here. But seeing him tear up about not knowing if Nick was going to be around for his child’s birth has to be the saddest.

So, I don’t know what the future holds. On one hand, you could say it doesn’t much matter since I’m out of here in three months. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care a hell of a lot about the community, friends, and students that have been my life for almost two full years now. We don't know how long Nick will be gone for. I may never see the man who vouched for me to go from volunteer to full teacher over a year ago. 

There is one thing I do know. I remember a conversation I had in a Guatemalan airport with Collin Motschke, a fellow johnnie who happened to be passing through at the same time. He asked what the most difficult part is about living and working in Colombia. I remember thinking for a long time before finally saying that I don’t think there is one. Most any difficulty I’ve experienced can be solved if I change my approach, either the way I see the situation, or change what I’m doing about it. In this case, I could complain to administration, or be angry about how things have gone down. Or I could show the kids that we don’t need to give two craps about administration and can kick some ass in English class anyways.

J

Spanish word of the day: Maybe the most important word in Colombian slang, pola means beer. It has no literal Spanish definition. But way back there used to be a beer named after a lady called Policarpa who apparently helped Colombia gain its independence from Spain. The beer, Pola, is no longer made, but the name has stuck. So whenever someone asks if you want a pola, say si.

Song in my head lately: I often leave YouTube to feed me its suggestions. Sometimes, I find gold. Jose Gonzalez’ Staying Alive is one such find.