urge for going: sick in bed, reconnecting with the blog...

home again from work today... in bed, slurping oatmeal (breakfast of the past four days) and trying to avoid the springy advances of my overly jovial (read: psychotic) cat. my throat still hurts (day 5) like swallowing glass, but I think the antibiotics have helped ameliorate the sinus congestion. if this is strep, it's really nasty and moving to my ears...i have had fevers every night, a head cold (maybe it was a sinus infection - one of only three possible illness options in turkey, it seems...), nasty runny nose, and big white patches growing in the back of my throat. yes, really really disgusting; i am half fascinated and half repulsed whenever i open my mouth in front of the mirror. they're like big white craters, or maybe lichens, just growing there, keeping my uvula company. and making it so that i can't swallow without incredible pain. which all makes me sound, incidentally, like the elephant man. "my name...*wheeze wheeze*...is john...merrick...*wheeze*..."

last night i dreamt that my boss was trying to sneakily fire me and i went into school to find her showing my replacement - a leggy, gorgeous woman, most probably of the Argentinian variety - around, telling her "...and English is spoken here all of the time...there are English-speaking teachers in every classroom...and we have an international student-body..." Dream-Hazel laughed pretty hard at all the lines. But this morning when I confirmed by sms that I would be staying in bed because I'm still in a lot of pain, she cutely and grammatically incorrectly replied with, "take a good care of you!" So I don't think I'm in the fire yet. Although if she fired me, I don't think I would really be too heartbroken to be honest... It would be kind of a relief, actually, and an excuse to jump-start what I really want to be doing here (just wait, more info to come...).

So, I (I just remembered how much my mother hates it when I use improper punctuation. Sorry, Mum.) should probably back up a bit, considering that I have been an inconsistent and selfish blogger over the past four months... Amongst other slow-moving, procedural routes that have led towards living in (somewhat) normalcy (like getting hot water, a functioning cell phone, furniture, a fridge, a bank account, a home phone line, permits to be here legally - YAY!), I have humbly welcomed the internet into my home. which means, that I will (hopefully) not be such a blog-lackey in the future. I'm hoping that this post helps rekindle my "writerly fire," since I, frankly, haven't found the words to say just what I want to of late. The Turkish-English linguistic limbo has shaken things up, I think.

Some life updates:
I have spent the last 3.5 months working as a preschool teacher at a Bilingual International Preschool in a ritzy, glitzy gated community in the northern Anatolian side of Istanbul. The kids are great (although, much to my shock in our first week of school, none speak English and almost all are Turkish..which makes communicating an interesting endeavor, to say the least.), but the school is owned by a greater network of schools and its upper management and businessy end of things is, bluntly, awful. Generally speaking, the Turkish teachers are treated unfairly - given much lesser salaries (around 700YTL per month) than foreign teachers (around 2200YTL per month) and expected to do more work. And then there's the fact that the Office broke my contract to essentially result in my demotion without telling me (What's the point of a contract, again?). At the same time, the Office tries to hyper-control the curriculum, sending out weekly programs (that don't make sense and have really unrealistic expectations - this week's four-year-old lesson plan theme, for example, is "Canada"...not ideal for a bunch of kids who don't even know - in Turkish OR English - which city in the world they are living in!) in English and constantly changing things through the network of higher-ups (coordinators, principals, other teachers, and on down the giant game of "telephone") to completely ignore predetermined plans and make way for new commands (On the morning of:"Oops, it's the anniversary of Ataturk's death, everyone clear your agendas, scrap your plans, and center the day around the founding of the republic - make flags, make remembrance wreaths, make more flags and remembrance wreaths...!!!"). It's not the plans that annoy me (although we have decorated enough Turkish flags to line the walls of my entire house, I think), it's the inconsistency, the change without concern for the fact that YES, we are legitimate teachers with legitimate plans and YES we put thought into our work. It's really the disrespect that gets me.

Okay, so a bit more complaining about work, and then on to new topics... My brain has been in a constant state of frenzy, since, as of about a month ago, I work with two teachers (lovely as they are) who only speak Turkish. Now, my Turkish is improving (yavas, yavas...slowly, slowly..) BUT I have become the official translator of not only our weekly newsletters home to parents (90% of whom don't understand English themselves) but, more crucially, our weekly lesson plans! Which is frustrating, since, without a full understanding of what the Office tells us the week's plan should be, my lovely co-teachers can't mold and morph their lessons to fit what our kids need. I worry that our students are getting a very strange sort of education that brushes the surface of many, complex ideas (in two languages), but never touches down to the solid root of a foundation.
ALSO I have found that when the kids overhear me speaking in Turkish with the other teachers (and they always hear, no matter how sneaky and covert I try to be!), they undo the English practice I have been trying to instill and revert to talking with me in Turkish. So then when I try to respond to my co-teachers only in English (as my job description requires, remember) a) they have no clue what I'm saying and b) they get passive-aggressively annoyed with me for replying in English when they know I have the ability to respond in Turkish. Whoosh! More on language: For two months we had two Spanish cousins attending our school. They were inseparable, adorable, hated rules, and only spoke Spanish. So, they were placed in my class and thought of, essentially, as "Hazel's students"... so to add to the general mania of our crazy little school , trying desperately to get up on its feet (see next paragraph), my brain, for two months, was working daily 7am to 7pm in Spanish (with the two boys), Turkish (with my co-teachers), and English (the only language I'm contractually supposed to be speaking!).
To top all of this confusion off, our school, I realized quickly after signing my contract, is a bit of an emergency case. The majority of last year's students were pulled and sent elsewhere because of the nightmare that was last year. The lack of organization and solid curriculum turned many parents off. So now we're left to clean up in the wake of our last principal, who left very abruptly this year. New principal, new teachers, one teacher left, new students coming, old students leaving, new servis (van with driver) plan bringing kids to and fro, old security guard fired, new security guard hired, pay cuts, pay cuts, more students leaving... It's constant. And tiresome. So enough blubbering about work.

Some cute photos of (the good parts of!) my job: