A Sickness of Epidemic Proportions?
At my school last week there was a severe lack of . . . students. On Tuesday, for example, I had only 3 of my usual 9 11th graders, with similarly low numbers arriving for other classes. On Wednesday during the day we had a meeting with our director in which he told us that there was the potential for a flu epidemic sweeping through our school (25 percent of the students had stayed home) and that they had invited a doctor to assess various children and, if it turned out that they had the flu, we would have had to close school on Thursday and Friday and make up for lessons on Saturday and Sunday, an option no one was really interested.
So it was much to my joy when, in a second meeting that day after school, the doctor gave his opinion and announced that flu was not the cause of sickness and that instead it was just a wicked strand of a cold (of course, potentially hurting his credibility a bit is the fact that he also went on to list one of the causes for the cold as being that children drink cold water at school . . . ). But nonetheless, it was music to our ears.
However, I use quotation marks around the title because I have a really strong feeling that all of the sickness in the students was as serious as they would want us to believe. On Friday at school I had the 11th graders again, the whole class together (usually I have half and my partner teacher takes half), and only eight of the 19 were in school. Later on that night, however, I went to the disco with some of my kids, partly as an experiment and partly because I was really bored at home, and I found that there were six kids who were not healthy enough to go to school but were healthy enough for the disco. It was a shocking but not surprising (if that makes sense), to say the least.
My first instinct is to blame the kids, of course – I really want to just blame them for not showing up. Then I have to remind my self that these are, after all, 17 and 18 year old children, and that if they don't want to come to school it should be the job of the parents to send their kids to school. So then I want to shift blame to the parents. But then I realize that, for at least of the two kids how were too sick for school, their family situations are not exactly what would be descried as 'normal,' as the mother of one works in Turkey and the other lives with just his grandma in the next village. Really, there is no one to blame.
Notes:
- Last Sunday was the “Olympiad” in the regional center for English and a handful of other subjects. I knew about this Olympiad a week or so ago and choose what student from the 110th and 11th grades to go – I thought that was the end of my responsibility. However, on Saturday evening at about 5:30 my host mom told me that the vice-director of my school had called and told me that I needed to go to the regional center with the kids, that the director of Foreign Languages for schools in the region requested that I go along, meaning that my normal schedule of sleeping for 10 hours a night on the weekend (me being tired combined with the amazingly fresh air and lack of noise besides chickens outside makes it all possible) was broken violently by a 6:53 wake-up call.
Well, as it turns out, the reason why we (me as well as the other TEFL volunteer in the region and a non-TEFL volunteer who lives in the regional center) were wanted was to correct the essays when the students were done. The questions were on topics like, “What is the role of education in the future,” and the answers were often stunning in their quality (like, senior level in college-quality work, only the answers here had fewer mistakes). It was a great opportunity for me, not only to spend the day speaking English but to also see just how far my kids have to go and how good the may be able to become one day. And it was hilarious for the non-TEFL volunteer to listen to the two teachers talk and how we kept talking our 'kids' when talking about our students.
And, for the record, my kids both finished dead last in their respective groups, results that I'm sure to not take personally.
- I received a question on the entry a little bit ago about the role of corruption in Moldova, using Russia as an example. I can say with confidence that the situation here is not as bad as in Russia, where according to all reports, corruption in so prominent that it's now the rule, a sort of modern feudal system (according to Newsweek). That's not to say, however, that the situation here is great.
For example, my partner-teacher told me a story about just how prevalent it can be. Every year, in every school, students have to take exams at the end of the 11th grade (or 12th, if the school goes that far), the results of which not only insure that a child can graduate from school but the results are also forwarded onto potential universities or colleges. Well, last year she said there were four kids who didn't work at all for eleven years of school, who could care less about learning English. As a result, they received a '4' on the exam, a failing grade, and they had to travel to Chisinau to re-take the test with at a school. There they simply paid the director of the school they were at 700 lei (a little over 50 dollars) for a score of '7'. Problem solved.
There are also massive problems with corruption in, of all fields, medicine, with there being a need to pay doctors for the 'real' care (if not, you might receive a pill for a problem like a broken-leg). There are two reasons for this, the first being that the salaries of doctors are so low (about 180 dollars a month) that they are much more likely to accepting a bribe than they otherwise would be if their salary was normal. The second problem is that the system simply sets itself up for the possibility of corruption, as most of the time it's encouraged to pay the doctor him/herself – in cash – for services rendered. There is a system in which a person can pay a desk – in which the money goes to the hospital itself – but that is largely ignored, the ignorance of which drains precious money from the hospital coffers, meaning that the salaries of doctors can't be raised, and because they can't be raised they have to take bribes. It's cyclical, a downward spiral.
Of course, there are frequent attempts to alleviate the problem. I can go on for 4 pages about something called the Millennium Challenge Account program started by George Bush II (Google it if you have the time or curiosity), but while Moldova has largely met some of the criteria, the one thing keeping them from receiving all the potential funds is corruption, leading to several attempts to fight it. The US Ambassador to Moldova, over Thanksgiving weekend, told us how in his opinion a key to solving the problem was simply taking away the need by raising the socio-economic status of those who might be tempted, and two weeks later I saw him on Moldovan State TV Russian news presenting new cars to a large group of new police officers.
And there are commercials on TV fairly consistently warning of the dangers of corruption, my favorite of which shows a students paying 1000 lei for a grade from a professor, then showing the professor on an operating table with the same student hovering over him with a scalpel, leading to a look of shock on the face of the bribe-taker as the gas is applied – then a message comes on in Russian saying something like 'don't let this happen to you.'
- I've written about the odd medical beliefs of many Moldovan's, and last week my host mom told me three different . . . interesting ideals regarding health:1) That I shouldn't lay on a cold floor because I'll hurt my kidneys, 2)That I shouldn't eat sun-flower seeds whole because I'll get appendicitis, and 3) That a person shouldn't eat when they are sick because the food feeds the sickness.
- We eat all the parts of the animals here, from the intestines of chickens and pigs to the feet of turkeys (as a result, I can say with confidence that the neck of a bird is very tender). Two weeks ago I saw something that was very surprising, however, as I watched my host mom eat the comb of a chicken head that had been boiled for a while.
At first I was shocked and thought it was amazingly odd and a little gross until I re-read one of my Newsweek's in which it was written that “El Bulli” in Spain, largely considered one of the top three restaurants in the world, a place where they get 30,000 requests a year for 5,000 tables and which takes reservations as much as six months in advance, one of their signature disks is lamb brain cooked with the head chef's signature 'liquification' technique. If given the choice between the two (boiled chicken-comb or liquified lamb brain), I think I'd choose the Moldovan delicatessen (my host mom's words).
- Two highlights from the last week (which, if they are existent, I like to end on):
1) On Saturday night on Russian 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' there was a question about which city is across the Bay Bridge from Oakland, with the answers being San Francisco, Chicago, Richmond, or Pittsburgh. I knew the answer right away (of course) and I told my family who was watching, which they responded to with questions of “you think so?.” “No”, I said, “I know so.” The guy walked away with the money, but first he said we would have guessed “Richmond.” When I told me family that he was “5000 kilometers from the answer,” they thought it was absolutely hilarious.
2) I wrote last time about my birthday party at a 4th graders house with her cousin in 2nd grade occupying a lot of my attention while all the men argued about politics in the Ukrainian dialect. Well, the second graders at school have a had a habit of a while of just hanging out in front of my door watching me work in-between lessons (as 7 year-olds are prone to do), terrified to go in.
On Monday of this week, however, they were all hanging around when the girl I met (her name is Zhena, short for Alexandra) confidently strolled through the center of them up to me with a little smirk on her face while the eyes of her classmates opened wide. That led to them all quickly following her inside and the start of the routine when, after every lesson, about 5 second graders drop into my room while we talk about their day's, how their lessons went and what not (I should say that only three talk while two little girls just smile, stare, and giggle incessantly when I talk to them). It's officially the best part of my day, every day up to now . . .
So it was much to my joy when, in a second meeting that day after school, the doctor gave his opinion and announced that flu was not the cause of sickness and that instead it was just a wicked strand of a cold (of course, potentially hurting his credibility a bit is the fact that he also went on to list one of the causes for the cold as being that children drink cold water at school . . . ). But nonetheless, it was music to our ears.
However, I use quotation marks around the title because I have a really strong feeling that all of the sickness in the students was as serious as they would want us to believe. On Friday at school I had the 11th graders again, the whole class together (usually I have half and my partner teacher takes half), and only eight of the 19 were in school. Later on that night, however, I went to the disco with some of my kids, partly as an experiment and partly because I was really bored at home, and I found that there were six kids who were not healthy enough to go to school but were healthy enough for the disco. It was a shocking but not surprising (if that makes sense), to say the least.
My first instinct is to blame the kids, of course – I really want to just blame them for not showing up. Then I have to remind my self that these are, after all, 17 and 18 year old children, and that if they don't want to come to school it should be the job of the parents to send their kids to school. So then I want to shift blame to the parents. But then I realize that, for at least of the two kids how were too sick for school, their family situations are not exactly what would be descried as 'normal,' as the mother of one works in Turkey and the other lives with just his grandma in the next village. Really, there is no one to blame.
Notes:
- Last Sunday was the “Olympiad” in the regional center for English and a handful of other subjects. I knew about this Olympiad a week or so ago and choose what student from the 110th and 11th grades to go – I thought that was the end of my responsibility. However, on Saturday evening at about 5:30 my host mom told me that the vice-director of my school had called and told me that I needed to go to the regional center with the kids, that the director of Foreign Languages for schools in the region requested that I go along, meaning that my normal schedule of sleeping for 10 hours a night on the weekend (me being tired combined with the amazingly fresh air and lack of noise besides chickens outside makes it all possible) was broken violently by a 6:53 wake-up call.
Well, as it turns out, the reason why we (me as well as the other TEFL volunteer in the region and a non-TEFL volunteer who lives in the regional center) were wanted was to correct the essays when the students were done. The questions were on topics like, “What is the role of education in the future,” and the answers were often stunning in their quality (like, senior level in college-quality work, only the answers here had fewer mistakes). It was a great opportunity for me, not only to spend the day speaking English but to also see just how far my kids have to go and how good the may be able to become one day. And it was hilarious for the non-TEFL volunteer to listen to the two teachers talk and how we kept talking our 'kids' when talking about our students.
And, for the record, my kids both finished dead last in their respective groups, results that I'm sure to not take personally.
- I received a question on the entry a little bit ago about the role of corruption in Moldova, using Russia as an example. I can say with confidence that the situation here is not as bad as in Russia, where according to all reports, corruption in so prominent that it's now the rule, a sort of modern feudal system (according to Newsweek). That's not to say, however, that the situation here is great.
For example, my partner-teacher told me a story about just how prevalent it can be. Every year, in every school, students have to take exams at the end of the 11th grade (or 12th, if the school goes that far), the results of which not only insure that a child can graduate from school but the results are also forwarded onto potential universities or colleges. Well, last year she said there were four kids who didn't work at all for eleven years of school, who could care less about learning English. As a result, they received a '4' on the exam, a failing grade, and they had to travel to Chisinau to re-take the test with at a school. There they simply paid the director of the school they were at 700 lei (a little over 50 dollars) for a score of '7'. Problem solved.
There are also massive problems with corruption in, of all fields, medicine, with there being a need to pay doctors for the 'real' care (if not, you might receive a pill for a problem like a broken-leg). There are two reasons for this, the first being that the salaries of doctors are so low (about 180 dollars a month) that they are much more likely to accepting a bribe than they otherwise would be if their salary was normal. The second problem is that the system simply sets itself up for the possibility of corruption, as most of the time it's encouraged to pay the doctor him/herself – in cash – for services rendered. There is a system in which a person can pay a desk – in which the money goes to the hospital itself – but that is largely ignored, the ignorance of which drains precious money from the hospital coffers, meaning that the salaries of doctors can't be raised, and because they can't be raised they have to take bribes. It's cyclical, a downward spiral.
Of course, there are frequent attempts to alleviate the problem. I can go on for 4 pages about something called the Millennium Challenge Account program started by George Bush II (Google it if you have the time or curiosity), but while Moldova has largely met some of the criteria, the one thing keeping them from receiving all the potential funds is corruption, leading to several attempts to fight it. The US Ambassador to Moldova, over Thanksgiving weekend, told us how in his opinion a key to solving the problem was simply taking away the need by raising the socio-economic status of those who might be tempted, and two weeks later I saw him on Moldovan State TV Russian news presenting new cars to a large group of new police officers.
And there are commercials on TV fairly consistently warning of the dangers of corruption, my favorite of which shows a students paying 1000 lei for a grade from a professor, then showing the professor on an operating table with the same student hovering over him with a scalpel, leading to a look of shock on the face of the bribe-taker as the gas is applied – then a message comes on in Russian saying something like 'don't let this happen to you.'
- I've written about the odd medical beliefs of many Moldovan's, and last week my host mom told me three different . . . interesting ideals regarding health:1) That I shouldn't lay on a cold floor because I'll hurt my kidneys, 2)That I shouldn't eat sun-flower seeds whole because I'll get appendicitis, and 3) That a person shouldn't eat when they are sick because the food feeds the sickness.
- We eat all the parts of the animals here, from the intestines of chickens and pigs to the feet of turkeys (as a result, I can say with confidence that the neck of a bird is very tender). Two weeks ago I saw something that was very surprising, however, as I watched my host mom eat the comb of a chicken head that had been boiled for a while.
At first I was shocked and thought it was amazingly odd and a little gross until I re-read one of my Newsweek's in which it was written that “El Bulli” in Spain, largely considered one of the top three restaurants in the world, a place where they get 30,000 requests a year for 5,000 tables and which takes reservations as much as six months in advance, one of their signature disks is lamb brain cooked with the head chef's signature 'liquification' technique. If given the choice between the two (boiled chicken-comb or liquified lamb brain), I think I'd choose the Moldovan delicatessen (my host mom's words).
- Two highlights from the last week (which, if they are existent, I like to end on):
1) On Saturday night on Russian 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' there was a question about which city is across the Bay Bridge from Oakland, with the answers being San Francisco, Chicago, Richmond, or Pittsburgh. I knew the answer right away (of course) and I told my family who was watching, which they responded to with questions of “you think so?.” “No”, I said, “I know so.” The guy walked away with the money, but first he said we would have guessed “Richmond.” When I told me family that he was “5000 kilometers from the answer,” they thought it was absolutely hilarious.
2) I wrote last time about my birthday party at a 4th graders house with her cousin in 2nd grade occupying a lot of my attention while all the men argued about politics in the Ukrainian dialect. Well, the second graders at school have a had a habit of a while of just hanging out in front of my door watching me work in-between lessons (as 7 year-olds are prone to do), terrified to go in.
On Monday of this week, however, they were all hanging around when the girl I met (her name is Zhena, short for Alexandra) confidently strolled through the center of them up to me with a little smirk on her face while the eyes of her classmates opened wide. That led to them all quickly following her inside and the start of the routine when, after every lesson, about 5 second graders drop into my room while we talk about their day's, how their lessons went and what not (I should say that only three talk while two little girls just smile, stare, and giggle incessantly when I talk to them). It's officially the best part of my day, every day up to now . . .
posted by Andy Buchanan at 1:10 AM
2 Comments:
funny, how a world away that we are dealing with sickness too!
5 people: 4 children and 1 adult have actually died from the flu here.
As I read this blog and the ways that they thought people got sick, I wondered, how do they care for the sick where you are?
Take care!
As I write this, I am sitting in a chalet in Biwabik MN, sore from skiing.
Andy,
Some pictures I'd like to see:
1.) Your host family other than your host brother and his wife, as we already saw one of them.
2.) Some of your students
3.) Other people you have mentioned on a regular basis that you think we should be able to put a face to.
Rob
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