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| Food Borne Pandemic |
It started on Tuesday. A few kids were absent, more than the usual at least, and rumours started to fly about a "stomach bug" that was spreading. The next day, more than half of the school was missing. Classes were suspiciously empty and my usually chatty Year 10s were completely quiet as they studiously completed their homework. Very strange! By Thursday afternoon, the school was nearly deserted, and the students that remained had no taste for any work whatsoever. By Friday afternoon, the remaining kids in years 9 through 12 (perhaps 20 total) took it upon themselves to wag en masse. Instead of teaching about urbanisation, I read a few chapters of DeLillo's Cosmopolis in an empty class, before packing it up and leaving school.
After a relaxing weekend, I walked to school with the new caustic noise rap from Death Grips on my headphones and thought about the week ahead and how I as going to conquer my latest nemesis of a class. As I approached the school, I noticed that the school buses weren't parked out front as per usual. I was a few minutes late for the singing of the national anthem (it happens everyday) but not that unprofessionally absent that the buses would have dropped the kids off and left. As I entered the gates, I saw that none of the classroom lights were on, which was even more strange. In fact, the entire school was empty with no teachers or students or even staff in sight. I wandered aimlessly looking for colleagues before checking out the cafeteria, where I walked in (a little late) to an impromptu school meeting.
The news? School was cancelled. In fact, students would not attend for the entire week. The cause was a "stomach flu" which to, you and I, means food poisoning. More than half of the school was affected, and the school had called in the infectious diseases hospital to test the food served at school, to examine any students or staff who felt sick. Teachers though were expected at school for the entire week. To do what? Well, that was undefined. Perhaps lesson plan, or catch up on marking. As usual, it took over an hour to make these points and the entire meeting was conducted in Mongolian (we had someone translate for us afterwards).
Being surprisingly up to date on my plans, I braced myself for a week of tedium. There's nothing as boring as a school without kids. The energy of the place is drained without the day to day, minute to minute, interaction of the classroom. There's only so many people to stalk on Facebook. There's only so many websites to aimlessly read. There's only so many long lunches you can take.
Yesterday, the new directive was that every class needed to be cleaned. Every surface needed to be scrubbed, all tables and chairs and walls disinfected. And this was to be done by teachers. Putting aside the efficacy of this plan in terms of dealing with a food borne illness, we're not janitors. We're teachers. And then, today, the cleaners went through the classrooms and cleaned all the surfaces again, as if to underline the futility of the exercise.
Luckily, today, I remembered to bring in my friend Andy Croome's new novel Midnight Empire, which was an excellent way to spend the morning and afternoon. Sandwiched in between these sessions, Lena, a coworker and friend, and I walked to the impossibly massive Naral Tuul ("Black") Market, a seemingly endless open air labyrinth selling basically anything and everything (from kimchi to garishly amazing nomad gear to Hitler statues). We had lunch in a little stall in the market. Mongolian tea (salty, milky and Lena's even had a piece of fat in it) with boiled meat (I want to say beef but it could have been horse), cabbage salad, potatoes with mayo, and 2 little mounds of white rice topped with ketchup. It might not be GANGNAM STYLE CHICKEN but it did the job. We hiked our way back to school, passing the Wrestling Palaces (both present and past) and the impressively CIA like exterior of the Mongolian headquarters of the Mormons. At school, we found teachers playing chess, reading books, facebooking, reading the paper, playing Nirvana covers on acoustic guitar, listening to music, tapping obsessively into their phones, and so on.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
