recommended listening: bears, by lyle lovett
It’s Christmas. Here they come, bearing persimmons.
Most of them have never been to a foreigner’s home before, much less an American’s, and who’s ever heard of a teacher inviting students to their home, or a boss inviting employees, or an “open house”? It makes sense that such a thing could require persimmons. Dozens.
And vinegar. They are artistically passionate about vinegar. I get an unseemly portion of my winter vitamins from pickles purchased from the guy half-a-mile down the street who stands by the 100-liter barrel and dips pickles out with a red and gold wooden ladle. And pickled cabbage—the kind that comes in the huge drums on the corner, too, with diced hot peppers floating in the sour stew, and once your digestive system has adjusted…wow! You can probably smell it in my sweat.
The cultural exchange goes both ways. Lauren still struggles with the beef-vegetable soup they love on cold days (one part carrot, one part potato, one part beef fat, one part oil, six parts water, a pinch of dill), and they have so often left insultingly significant remnants of chocolate chip cookies that she no longer even tries.
We welcome them and put the persimmons on the table, where they sit uneaten next to the emptying plate of brownies (score one for Betty Crocker!). The locals give a homemade wreath, “traditional, like the one they had on Friends,” and a two-liter jar of homemade pear juice. They love “Jingle Bells,” and “Deck the Halls,” and they can’t understand why anyone would be content to sing, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” only once a year.
But it’s gotten colder.
The temperature in the living room only reaches the low fifties most days. There are no ventilation ducts in the orphanage, and local traditional medicine states that cold air is responsible for every ailment, so windows absolutely must remain closed. This means that every time you enter the orphanage, the sweat, excrement, and vomit of 800 children assaults your nose the same way looking directly at the sun affects your eyes, temporarily making it impossible for to perceive anything else.
Then you notice the guys in gas masks. Lauren is at the orphanage when they enter, wearing what looked like B-grade movie props and spraying the room with white powder.
Parasites hit Room 4, and now twenty kids are scratching until they bleed.
Mary, Lauren’s supposed protégé, is refusing to order the recommended dietary changes. The food is available, but the bottom line is there’s no detergent, and very little soap, and the nurses would rather have malnourished and constipated wards than thirty sets of diarrhea-stained sheets in the soapless hand wash.
But these guys in the masks? Cockroaches, the man explains. The exterminators had offered to come at night and only do rooms without children, but the head nurse ordered them to spray every room during the day. The head nurse explains that she didn’t really have a choice. Getting the exterminators here took months of paperwork, and there’s no guarantee they will actually come at night if they go away right now, and every room needs to be sprayed, and there’s no way to move all of the children from one room to another, and look… The child is so disfigured it takes a minute to look past the misshapen arms and legs, but there it is: its ear is being eaten by cockroaches.
The good news is that the nine-year-old burn victim will probably recover. There are forty patients to every care-giver, and one nurse had to take a child to the hospital, so the remaining nurse, with seventy nine severely disabled children on her hands, had asked an older child to assist. This mildly retarded teenager had followed directions—holding her screaming charge down and bathing her thoroughly—without noticing that the bath water was nearly boiling.
That day, Lauren decides she probably shouldn’t go back to the orphanage until her morning sickness calms down.
A couple weeks later, the weather gets colder. And the government shuts down the new orphan rehabilitation project.
In fact, the government begins shutting down everything.
At least ten groups have been closed since Christmas. Dozens of foreign families are being given ten days to three months to get out of the country. With the rehabilitation project, the government inspectors couldn’t find anything worth closing it on the spot, but they said to go ahead and sell the building that was being remodeled for a therapy center. “The orders are from up high,” they said. “You can close in one month without a court appeal or six months with one, but you’re closing.”
The English school hasn’t been hit yet. The new term is supposed to begin in three weeks, so we have a problem more imminent possible exile. On the last day of the fall term, the university set a date for our move to a space on campus. That’s when the government turned off heat to the English school.
Yesterday, we learned that the university official who arranged the new space had been fired. That same day, twenty students came to register for classes. I didn’t tell them they no longer had a school.
When I come home, Ella said, “We can just sit next to our little heater together. Isn’t winter fun? Let’s make popcorn!” And a package came today. We sit next to the heater, under our blankets, and feel grateful.
We tuck them under narrow quilts stuffed with twenty pounds of cotton, and go to bed.
Hours later, and immediately, I’m fully awake, fully alert.
I reach quietly for my watch. 2:30 a.m. Something is wrong. I can’t hear any sound in the house. No sounds of animals, so it probably isn’t a tremor or an intruder. Then I realize: my ears are warm. It’s warm at 12:30 in the morning!
I jump out of bed. It’s comfortably warm! Something’s wrong! The living room is probably over seventy. Standing in the kids’ room, I start to sweat. Steam’s coming from the back of the toilet bowl. I put on slippers and run across the courtyard to the furnace room. The furnace is roaring. For a month, we’ve barely had enough gas pressure to keep the flame lit, and now, it looks like a blowtorch. We have heat!
After turning it down, I start back across the yard and hear another strange sound. Water is dripping off the trees. Not only have the local officials decided to turn on the gas, but a warm front has entered at midnight.
On Thursday, I meet the new liaison with the university: Professor George, the one who took my writing course the previous term. The professor, now an interim vice-president, thanks me repeatedly for coaching him in his Fulbright application. “You prepared me for every question they asked! It’s wonderful!” In this culture, that’s the equivalent of having The Godfather say that he owes you a favor. He even asks me what remodeling I want done in the new place (He asks what I want!) and takes notes (He takes notes!). The documents are all signed, and we’ll have the keys in two days. George, the liaison, will even provide all of the labor required to move everything and do any remodeling necessary in the new space. A couple days ago, he sent an email (He initiates contact!) saying, “Thanks for the massage. I’ll get bagels for your staff.”
OK, there are good reasons Fulbright scholars shouldn’t rely too much on spell-check, (“massage” = “message”, “bagels” = “badges”), but for now we’re reveling in an unprecedented heat wave. We’re warm at midnight. We have a building. Everything’s turning up massages and bagels.
After a week of temperatures in the sixties and seventies, Caleb has a seizure.
It started with a double ear infection. A couple days later, he refused breakfast. Today, his temperature reached 103. Then 104.
I go out of the room to put away the leftover pancakes, and return to find him shaking.
His knuckles are white, held in a boxer’s stance in front of his face as he shakes.
His eyes turn toward me.
Lauren kneels by us.
I sing quietly.
Caleb shakes.
His mouth opens.
His eyes roll back and he relaxes.
It only lasted about a minute. He sleeps most of the rest of the day, crying only if he wakes to find no one holding him.
The next day, we are supposed to move the English school, finally. Blue skies. Gently cool weather. But the moving trucks and workers from the university never come.
The next day, they again promise the moving trucks. Nothing.
The next day, it’s raining too hard to move. We decide instead to focus on cleaning up the new space. That’s when we discover a chemical lab in the listening-speaking classroom. On the first walkthroughs, the chunks of cement and plaster on the floors distracted us from the padlocked classroom. We finally get the superintendent to remove the lock and find a fully equipped lab, with a ventilation systems, a shower, and open beakers of powders and liquids. The work benches are piled with manuals on pesticide production in several languages. The building superintendent is highly indignant. It seems the previous lease-holder of the room is several months behind on payment, and doesn’t have permission to build this kind of lab. Further investigation shows that his family hasn’t seen or heard from him for three months. We get a different classroom.
So we finally get to move on Friday, with almost three hundred students signed up to begin classes on Monday.
It rains all day. We hire our own workers and our own trucks, and carry everything: light fixtures, desks, couches, book cases, carpet, and linoleum down 63 steps and up 199.
We are just taking a late lunch break, looking out the nine-storey windows while munching pastries that taste exactly like jelly doughnuts stuffed with cabbage when the first emergency report comes in. Rachel heard on the bus: an earthquake is coming! The reports are verified over the next 45 minutes through text messages, cell-phone calls, and concerned students wanting us to evacuate the building: massive earthquakes, 6.0 or higher, predicted between 4:00 and 6:00! The staff asks, very politely, if they can go home.
Sunday, with temperatures in the 80s, blue skies, and everything set up in the earthquake-free building and earthquake-free city, Caleb plays with the dog, and Ella reads books under the grape vine, and we rest.
“You know what today is?” Lauren asked.
“Two years?”
“Yep. Happy anniversary. What do you want to do to celebrate?”
“Eat chips.”
“White cheddar, or paprika?”
“Seriously?”
“The downtown store just got a shipment. I bought fifteen packs.”
“You’re the best.”
