Mal-Ã -l’aise (Sunday, 2011 September 4)
Tomorrow is when school restarts — the rentrée scolaire — and I’m a little uneasy. Uneasy is an understatement. I’m not ready. I don’t want to be a teacher again. I want another week, maybe two. Actually, saying "another" suggests that I want a week like these weeks have been — what I want is a week where nobody bothers me, where I don’t have to deal with anyone at all, where Brondon doesn’t show up to ask questions of such mindblowing vapidity that I want to clando anywhere at all, just to not have to be here. I know that’s arrogant and judgmental, I know he’s a kid and he’s bored, but I have a life too, and it’s not fair that he gets to usurp it!
I’m at least grateful that my schedule for this year looks a little better. 14 hours instead of 16. No 7-hour Fridays. Friday afternoons off entirely. But what I really want is 12 hours, or even 10, so that I can work on other non-scholastic things: teacher training, or training anyone at all really. Ryan apparently does training at a church group, not because they have a special need but because at least they’re already meeting regularly. I’d like to work on our infrastructure for Volunteers — our wiki needs a lot of love. I’d like to write a bunch of stuff on how to make sense of Yaoundé. I’d like to do a journalism club where I can start teaching people to ask annoying questions and share the answers. And I think Admin including Exalted Directress would like those things too, but I just don’t have a whole lot of fight left in me to make those sorts of things happen. "On va arranger," one of my censeurs told me last week — "it will be fixed" — but that could mean anything, specifically it could mean nothing at all. My boss Francis will be coming by, hopefully early in the year, and maybe he’ll lean on my school a little bit too. I guess we’ll see.
I got to see Claude today. He had mentioned that he was pleasantly surprised that I came back to Cameroon after my time in America. Well, I’m a little surprised too. Relatedly, here’s Zara’s post about ETing. Zara was a bit of a surprise, because she was geographically very close to me (in our Contact Cluster), and she was already at the one-year mark (way beyond when most ETs happen). Ben mentioned that Christine’s blog doesn’t mention at all her impending ET; her last post is a few days before it happened and all it says is that she had been sick for a while. I don’t have any news about Elizabeth G., who ETed around the same time as Christine. Claude exhorts me to keep in mind that it’s really only 9 more months, and that such a brief period of time is hardly anything at all.
Here’s a post by Kim, one of the new volunteers in our cluster, which includes some pictures of her new bedsheets (and matching pillowcases!). Check them out, they’re really quite charming.