Past present

About 5.30 am I hear the sounding of chopping as one of the students starts splitting logs in order to get large pieces of kindling for lighting the little brazier. Another starts pounding chillis in a large mortar for breakfast. Groups of five take it in turns to cook each day. It is quite cool at night during this season and I throw on another of the thin cotton patchwork blankets. They are surprisingly heavy but poor at keeping the heat so I try to balance warmth versus weight. I think longingly of my lovely, light duvet at home. Before the sun has burnt off the morning mist, the students are already warming themselves around fires they have started under the coconut palms. I have the luxury of my own room and a rather hard mattress on the floor but they sleep on thin woven mats on wooden platforms, about 10 of them in together, each wrapped in a blanket. That probably does not encourage lying in. The smell of woodsmoke percolates through the shutters and I grab a few more minutes of cosiness before I get up.

Warming up early morning

10-12 per platform-communal living

This morning, some are sweeping the red earth under the trees and sprinkling water to keep the dust down. Later as the sun warms the air, the students bathe in the river, like water nymphs, the females in their tameins, a traditional cloth wound round their breasts that covers to the knees and the males in their longyis, the male equivalent round the waist. When bathing, they also wash clothes. Despite the dust and living conditions, they keep themselves remarkably clean with rows and rows of laundry always drying around the place. The river seems remarkably resilient with plenty of fry in the shallows despite the daily inundation of washing powder and shampoo. The two cisterns on site fill very slowly so there is not enough water for them all, hence the river bathing .I have my own toilet/bathroom bucket so do have to dunk myself in the river. Furthermore, there is a skill to washing in a tamein that I dare not attempt and their general modesty forbids me from appearing in a swimming costume.

River nymphs

Daily laundry from the river

Washing teeth by the cistern

 Later a group turns up to clean the ‘office’, a large room for staff with the router, a table and chair and bookshelves filled with dusty old books and textbooks. Two of them each take what looks like half a very dried coconut and start vigorously rubbing the floorboards. On further inspection I realise the mysterious objects are exactly that! So much for modern processed cleaning products. The office is only marginally cleaner after they go, as the dust remains untouched, lying thickly on the sockets, shelves and books but the floor looks very polished.

Staying in these circumstances leads me often to reflect on the notion of development. Here certain aspects of modernity appear to settle, like the ubiquitous dust,  on top of existing practices and conditions creating a world that exposes shards of a Western style present  but  that stands truly in the past. In the developed world, advancements appear to sweep the old away. Tarmac roads replace dust tracks, indoor plumbing and bathrooms replace privies and tin baths, washing machines make hand washing of clothes redundant . Here is the internet, and it is pretty good at that, the students have mobile phones but they don’t have beds, indoor or flush toilets. Some of the cooking is still done over fire, yet there is a bottled gas burner and the most enormous electric rice cooker. Students wash themselves and their clothes as their parents and forebears did, but using shampoo and washing powder in plastic containers. Women on their way to the camp, carrying huge baskets on their back secured by head straps, are overtaken by motorbikes and the occasional truck. Consumer goods and technology mesh oddly with a rural and subsistence way of life.

 

Kitchen with brazier on floor (large rice cooker off camera!)

I am teaching my students the past simple. E.g 1. I ( go) to a party last weekend. Put the sentences into the past tense. 4. I (eat) mohinga this morning. They write ‘I eat mohinga this morning.’ I explain it should be ‘I ate mohinga this morning.’ ‘But teacher,’ they say, ‘it is this morning, it is now, so it is the present. So it is eat’. They are right..but grammatically wrong. When is the past the present and the present the past? Something more than a linguistic conundrum.

Checkpoint into IDP (internally displaced people) area

                                        The camp is another 25 minutes by motorbike or 1 hour walking.