Emily Austin's Reports

I live in a little room near big mountains and a bright sky. I watch the peaches grow. Green, yellow, peach peach peach. It has been eight weeks. The trees are growing bare. So am I.

You are shocked. But no, no, listen--this is what I mean: I live in my bones here, in my deep bones. The clutter leaves strong, bare places. I do not mean I am growing empty. I mean I am growing open.

Words are changing here, gathering new meanings.

This is what I knew about land before I arrived (I have spent my life on flat land): you take it for granted, it keeps its distance, it gives itself up to the sky. This is what I am learning about land here: it demands our attention, it is impossibly visible, close, and overwhelms the sky.

This is what I knew about time before I came here: there is never enough.
This is what I am learning: you cannot think about time in terms of quantity.

Where do I live? I live inside a contradiction, this is inside another contradiction, that is inside another. And there is always another.

I love my students but teaching is an impossible tast. Teaching is an impossible task but somehow I manage to do it every day. I hate teaching some days but some days I love it, when the classroom is alive, when the students are brave, and fighting, fighting, fighting to learn. More often, though, it is me banging my head into a brick wall, while they fall asleep, zone out, giggle or gossip. What do reflexive pronouns have to do with their lives? Nothing.

Everything. Education is the only out here. They know this, but they are thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, they grew up deep inside the present tense, they live there now. It is nearly impossible to take seriously a task which is so far away.

I admire this present tense living. I watch joy erupt with undeniable force. It is a simple thing--the invasion of the moment. I let it in, and as I grow more roots in the present, it alters me. But I also despair. My task is to move my students forward. I do not know how to make them feel the pressure of the future, I do not know how to make them care. I thought I would leave this, at least, behind me. I thought apathy was an American epidemic. It is not. It is becoming a global trend. And as the demographic of St. Rodrigue changes, apathy reveals more and more of itself.

I get crazy. I rage with plans for creative lessons--I watch those plans fail. I retreat to standard lesson plans--I watch those plans fail. I throw all plans out the window and find that now I am staying sane. Living in the present tense is something they can understand. If I respond to the moment, they respond to me. I feel less like a teacher than an improvisor, trying desperately to keep the attention of the crowd. I write songs for them to sing about the infinitive. I make them go jump in the rain and chant their Sesotho song about jumping in the rain in order to explain rhyme. I send them on scavenger hunts. I don't let them into the class if they haven't done their homework. I dance. I get them to dance. They learn about time zones by spinning in a circle to the left, one hand on their hip, one hand on their chest. Yesterday, I played John Coltrane on tiny speakers as my B1s began to take their test on pronouns. I cannot describe their reaction. One of my students looked up, laughing, shaking her head, and said, "M'e Emily, you confuse us."

This is where I live. I feel everything here. It is neither possible or impossible--it is actual. Dogs bite me. I go through a minor hell trying to get rabies shots. Students steal our peaches. Students offer us peaches. Lauren and I are lonely and some days we're utterly exhausted. Or we're happy and crazy to start new things. It makes no sense. It makes perfect sense.

I let go of sense. I am here. I watch peaches grow, and go bare.