Settle, o dust

The last few weeks have been a nervous breakdown averted, a gradual routine established and a grudging resignation accepted. As for the breakdown: I learned to (kind of) manage my daunting workload and begin to (kind of) enjoy my 60-hour work weeks. The routine: I have figured out (kind of) how to arrange my time, how to get the things I need in Khartoum without a car and the best days to get them. Resignation: I have accepted that I will work all day every Saturday and part of each Friday, all year.

It really helps that I get to flee Sudan in two weeks for a weeklong visit to Jordan. Fab vacation and legal alcohol, here I come!

At least teaching is important, right? When you're exhorting children to submit their reading response journals, hauling them off the playground to spend 30 minutes sitting in the office at lunch because of bad classroom behavior, breaking up fights, or answering the same question for the sixth time in five minutes, that's hard to keep in perspective.

(Then there are the times, like yesterday, when I watched an 11-year-old standing on desk chair try to scoot the chair 15 feet across a "toxic bog" while his classmates cheered him on. Or the time I discovered two boys taking turns reading in pairs...by reading every other word. So cool when you are 12!).

Okay, I will cease with the teacher stories. They really aren't funny or relevant if you don't spend all day with "tweens." Other points of possible interest:

The expatriate community in Sudan...is varied and curious. I have met British, Canadian and Australian teachers, Norwegian and Croatian soldiers with the U.N., South African pilots, Spanish and American aid workers, Ugandan police officers, Indian businessmen and even Pakistani "house-husbands." People are in Sudan for all kinds of reasons, and in Khartoum you would almost never know that Darfur is stagnating/worsening or that relations between the northern and southern parts of the country are worsening except for reports from the BBC. (Okay, I admit I haven't started reading the local papers, even the English-language ones). If you want more opinions on such matters, I would prefer you e-mail me :)

The kids are all right

I've just finished my first full week ever as a teacher in the midst of Sudan's

worst flooding in 20 years

. We had a massive rainstorm on Monday around 2 p.m., just as school let out for the day, and parts of campus are still covered in inches of water. Khartoum is completely flat, the Nile is at its highest right now, and Khartoum's infrastructure is, uh, not that great, so there is no place for all the extra water to go. Apparently even some of our school guards have lost their homes in the flooding. I myself have only had to "suffer" some dirty water on the floor and in my sink and, yesterday, a smashed window in the 4th-floor laundry room during yet another rainstorm. (Good thing I didn't go up there to view the storm!)

The rundown on my job: there are about 30 teachers at my school, and I am part of a 5-teacher middle school team. I teach 5th/6th grade English (plus a high school journalism elective), my colleague teaches 7th/8th grade English (and high school electives), and there is one teacher each for middle school math, science and social studies. Yes: my colleagues teach grades 5-8 every day, one class per grade!

My students are from all over the world, and I actually do not teach any white Americans, my own demographic and the one predominant in the places I grew up and went to college. Instead, my students represent a delightful mix of cultures and ethnicities: Sudanese, Sudanese-American, German-Sudanese, Dutch-German, Dutch-Korean, British-Sri Lankan, Korean, Chinese, Indian and Afghan. The downside for me as a new language arts teacher is my students' wide range of English language ability. Some are native speakers while others have only recently attended ESL classes. When I asked my 6th graders what made good writing, they responded not with "exciting details" and "juicy words" (as my 5th graders did) but "spelling," "good grammar," "punctuation" and "correct verbs." So I see my (monumental) challenge this year as making English less of a source of rules and anxiety and more about accessibility and creativity and FUN.

My weekend plans: $12 Thai massage this afternoon, get government-mandated HIV test tomorrow morning (fun!...not), go to gym, attempt to enroll in Arabic language classes. Between planning for school, lacking a car, the difficult travel in Khartoum after the rains and the generally remote location of my apartment, it's hard to get much done around here after school hours. I have to keep reminding myself that I have the entire year to take language classes and explore, but I am impatient.

Cloudy and humid in Khartoum,

Charlotte