For the love of a moose!

I am sitting in a hostel in Turin, it is hot, it is stifling, i am about to have my second cold shower in half an hour. But i cannot steer away from the fact that i am so grateful to be here right now, for all the events and things that brought me to be in this place, at this time with so many things to look forward to and back to, that i love the heat for the heat is here and here is nowhere in a sense but in another it is everywhere.

I was writing abut exhaustion last time i wrote. That exhaustion reached a plateua where the fact that i was working all day every day just become a fact and not something to worry about. I knew the people i worked with and the way they worked, I knew the hotel, I knew the deal. In a sense it was peaceful. Well besides the fact that shortly after I wrote last a new disaster struck. I was standing on a balcony, all dressed up to go to the Friday night disco with the children and I shouted

“There was a great big moose”( using my hands as moose horns of course)

They screamed back from below “There was a great big moose!”

“And he drank a lot of Juice!!”

“and he drank a lot of juice” they screamed happily back.

In my excitement of my favourite part of the song (Way-yo, Way yo way yo way yo way yo) I jumped off the chair, landed strangely on my ankle and in tears I called for ice and the next day i was on crutches for 5 days. It was tough, there were only 3 tutors the last week as we had a lot less children and trying to carry things, crutching around, and work at an active camp was painful. This was also added to the fact that the children were obsessed with my crutches so every time i wante do move somewhere i looked around and the crutches were attached to an energetic 6 year old who had incited an older child to make them short enough for her. I enjoyed their revelry so most of the time i did the hop and swing arms for momentum thing and resorted to hand stand walking which as cool as it sounds- isn’t so practical. Luckily, my foot healed fast and I still have an absolute love for the Moose song (For he just drank SO much juice!)

And then it was the Friday night disco again, I was walking somewhat unsteadily but i had 2 feet that transported me (How often do we take such precious things for granted?). I had the week off and was intending on visiting a friend in Switzerland when a strange blonde lady approached me and said “We need people to work for us next week...”

Without asking many questions, I said yes and the next day I watched my children's show around 2pm and whisked myself 200 m down the road to another hotel, another company, another ideology, awaiting children who arrived at 5pm. I was exhausted but happy to be somewhere else doing something different and obviously, being paid. Here we did not sing the moose song or any song in the morning, i did not have to run around and play games and make the children dance on their head. It was very composed, if i wanted the kids to do book work for 2 hours that was no problem. But the show at the end of the week was of utmost importace, I didn’t really understand the power sturcture there but it was myself and one other guy on a summer camp with 30 children (the week before we had been 3 tutors with 18 children) and every night we had group dances (Lady Gaga, Katie Perry, Danza Kuduro and the like) and during lessons in the day all my co worker wanted to do (as he was head honcho at the place) was make an amazing show to impress the parents. As i had mistakenly stolen a friends Beauty and the Beast dvd at the beginning of the summer he decided we should do a whole production of songs and acting of Beauty and the Beast with Italian children. Wow. So he spent time writing the script with the older children, acting, show rehearsng and i was told to teach 8 year olds songs like Tale as old as time, Gaston, kill the Beast and Be Our Guest and with the amount of “listen and repeat” i had to do I was near throttling someone. During lessons these poor kids just had to learn songs and i must say they had brave hearts for the complaining was not as i would have expected. They dealt with the tedium while i was all the while thinking how it was unfair that jsut ebcause parents need to be impressed we need to give children a rough bucket of tedium...

Nevertheless, the show was amazing, ridiuclously amazing, i was impressed with the children and begrudgingly impressed with my coworker for the kind o show that was organised in one week with Italian children but i coulnd’t help feeling out of my depth and somewhat pleased to return to a place where i really know what’s going on.

So i was whisked finally, after 4 weeks of working every single day, every single night and pretty much all the time to a day camp. To the normality of working hours like 8 – 4.30. Imagine. I was shuffled into the most kind, caring Italian family, they did not speak English and the mother was mad about chatting about this and about that, she could talk about anything that came to her mind for hours, food, weather, fashion and with all her chattering away I got the chance to not feel awkward about listening and understanding and trying to reply in Italian. The father was equally cool in a different way. Actually seriously cool. He owned a room which he called his cave, downstairs, musty and dark absolutely full, top to floor, head to foot, side to side of records and cds of quality music. He had been collecting music for 30 years and it’s a haven of interesting music which he can explain the history of all of them. I didn’t always understand beause when he saw i had an interest in this he took me for a little session down in the cave, showing me his turntables and how they work and linking songs for radio but when he saw i was interested he got more and more excited so he spoke too fast and i couldn’t keep up. His enthusiasm was infectious though and without me asking he made me an mp3 cd of all the pink floyd music he owns (which is everything there is, vinyls and cds).

And then i stepped on a stone. A rather big stone. And being Mary I took no notice of it and continued with my life. And then i did not clean the gauge in my foot and then it got infected and it was blue and pussy and disgusting and i was limping and trying to clean and pin it out but was too squeamish to do so properly. So the family decided i couldn’t go on in this fashion so they took me to their friend the surgeon who did a house job and while his 10 year old son handed him various metal tortue devices i watched as he cut my foot open, talking abotu guitar and south africa and other exciting things. He said he didn’t need payment as it was “for Africa” and gave me some antiseptic and some cool surgeon plasters. And then I had tonsilitis and i couldn’t swallow my spit for a couple days (horrendously uncomfortable) and the family took me the following day to another doctor who wrote me a prescription for antibiotices, said he didn’t want payment either (Africans huh) and while i was taken to watch the final Harry Potter in Italian that night my italian parents went out and bought my medicine.

Ah being taken care for the Italian way. Such a level. I got quite a talking to though about not wearing shows (I have never been told off in another language besides English) and swinging in thunderstorms which is what they attributed my tonsilitis to- which i completely didn’t agree with but i humbly accepted the reprimands and the caring that went with it.

The antibiotices improved my disease so fast that by the last evening i stayed with them i went out with the other tutors for a farewell drink and we drank R15 prosecco in the park and giggled about silly things and the next day i awoke at 6am, to find my adopted Italian father ready and waiting to take me to another train station to to take me to another train station which would take me to Swizterland and the holy days of holiday after 8 weeks of continous madness.

We are Young and Free!!!

I am lying in my hotel bedroom. It is Friday, I have been here for 2 weeks and I am staying for a third. Children are screaming outside as I turn the music louder, trying to drown them out. However, this seems impossible. They are playing a game called Safari where they have to capture and drag a tutor who is some sort of animal to the judges to get points. It gets brutal, it is Friday I am tired, I am happy that at this moment I do not have to be a safari animal and have children drag and pull me across the garden so that they will win another game.

Competition. Italian children. It never fails.

No but I’m lying. I am not tired. Tired means that you need to go to bed and sleep and you will be ok tomorrow. Tired is an emotion that I have long since passed. Now, I am actually swimming in the deep realms of exhaustion. I have not seen my Mary energy in days, I have been walking in what seems like a flutter of dream-like images past children, talking to children, teaching, dancing, singing and functioning on an energy that is not my own but I must have borrowed from another reserve from some other place..

There are 2 types of camps in Italy. At the city camps we work very respectable hours from 9am to 5pm with some short breaks in between and live in host families where we are fed and cared for. We can sleep and they take us on nice exploratory evening adventures. Then there is the other kettle of fish (on a side note: has anyone ever really seen a kettle of fish?) a summer camp. Summer camp assimilates a sort of every-waking-minute commitment. There is no such thing as an evening off and there is no such thing as a weekend. The children arrive at around 9am on Sunday morning and from then we have lessons, arranged activities, lunch, supper, breakfast, night duty (making sure they actually go to sleep) until Saturday afternoon where we plan the next week and go to sleep until the children arrive again on Sunday. All their time is taken up by us and thus, all our time is taken up by them.

In a peaceful life I am a very good sleeper. I lie in bed and think a little, enjoying my thoughts slowly whirling around my head before I settle into the crazy thought mode and fall gently into sleep. But here my mind is full of repetitive songs like “I’m a little teapot”, lesson plans for the following day, the things the children said, how to make thirteen year olds excited, and how I cannot sleep when there are three people in my bedroom. These thoughts whirl and twirl for at least an hour every night and awake at anew exhausted level the following day.

Exhaustion. This is a place I have never idled at for this long.

Oh but it is always interesting, I cannot ever say that I come close to the painful disease of boredom. In fact, it is fun. We had a talent show last night and many children performed. Karate, dances, guitar playing, fake trumpet playing, and synchronized mechanical cars. Fabulous. I remembered all the talent shows I performed on camps as a child. We sang (the Spice Girls, Oh Ddddear), we danced (Tragedy, when the feeling’s gone…), and we did little skits. Anyway, we gave prizes to 3 groups who tied second and a winner. Last time we gave all the performer’s prizes and the winner a big prize. Oh but the disappointed on 2 little girl’s faces (who had in fact done a very good dance) almost broke my heart. I know that feeling, I remember the cold flush of disappointment. As adults we learn that we don’t want to handle disappointment and so we learn not to try unless we know we are very good (or ridiculous enough as the case may be). And it was agonizing as I felt I was teaching children that they must not try because they may not be the winner. Some children at a young age never want to try and some do and the fact that I have a hand in determining their attitude for the future is somewhat harrowing.

Oh silly decisions. One has to be so careful yet at the same time, sometimes one group has to win and someone has to lose. It is competition, the children learn English through competition. It is something I struggle with, that is, letting one child win over another but I still use competition consistently, to make my life easier as a teacher.

Oh but yet again my own education continues. About people, relationships. We are chucked into a camp with people you have never seen before and immediately you have to learn how to work together, who leads, who follows, who prepares, who …. Difficult. For the most part, I love the people I work with. In time, and not all the time. It is frustrating, I am frustrating, they are frustrating. When to work, when to relax, when you are relaxing and others are working. Life. people.

And, I am a person, I am not going to like all the children I teach. Sometimes they are too shy to talk to me and I don’t get much out of them and sometimes there is a child that is simply not my kind of person. For the first day of week one, 2 girls arrived from the South of Italy, they had sent their bags before them full to the brim with clothes for every outfit they may possibly need for the 2 weeks of Summer camp (I have lived out of a bag perhaps a third of the size since November) I surveyed these girls who were going to be in my class for 2 weeks and judged them as perhaps a bit, at least, an effort to entertain. Older children are an effort in general as these camps were not constructed for children 13 and over. By some weird brain function that I have going on my head this is the age I always ask to teach. Trying to make preteens who are too cool for school NOT too cool for school is, well, a challenge. And I judged these girls as such.

So I began every day with a stretching session. Reach for sky, reach for the ground. Honestly this was not for the children, this was for me I always forget to stretch, why not get paid for it? After a few days they learnt there was no point arguing as it was happening anyway and after a few more days when we were playing a general forfeit game they were running around tables 10 times with smiles on their faces, loving volleyball games and being blindfolded as their peers told them directions in English. Weirdly, these 13 year old girls with tons of makeup, fancy clothes and who don’t want to get dirty turned out to both possess fabulous hearts. I am 23 and I should know by now that fancy clothes and make up does not make a certain type of person. I should know that but again I find my perceptions judge first before I allow a pure judgement. Humbled, yet again. Teaching truly has taught me in these funny mountains that the children who at first frustrate me may end up being the ones I love the best.

Yes, exhaustion, learning and fun. The children exhaust us and they don’t sleep but then we get to play water games and drench the children in cold mountain water, there’s tennis day where I tan in the sun while the children get a tennis lesson and lake day when the children play in the lake while I focus on practicing my English (inappropriate jokes, sarcasm and the like) with fellow tutors and continue my tannig layers. Sometimes I walk on my hands and all the children start clapping like I am sort of upside down hero.

“We are young and free!” I shout in my morning routine. “No, Mary we are young but we are NOT frrree…ahhh, my mother…” one of my Southern Italy princesses says by way of explanation. I understand. Freedom is complicated. This is a mad life. An exhausted life. And maybe not a free life. But I am in the mountains in Italy. It is a good life.

I am not an Italian Woman!

Ah Italy, again. Teaching spoiled Italian children. Again. Pasta, Mozzarella, Prosciutto, again.

So I flew into Milan and a few days later I was thankfully out of Milan, in a car with a 7 year old, a 4 year old and their parents on our way to a villa next to Lake Garda, while they loudly belted out “Mamma Mia in that mumbling sort of way when you have no idea what the words really are. The "babies" hummed along and everyone danced in their seats. Ah yes, i thought, this is the life. Sunshine finally, food, champagne (no, not champagne, Prosecco, Champagne is specifically from the Provence of Champagne in France, I must not forget this or I will, yet again, upset some Italians) and at this fancy villa there was a huge swimming pool, the first outdoor swimming pool i have entered since November, NOVEMBER? Really? How long it has been that I have been cold, it is June now and i have been in countries and places in so many clothes layered upon clothes and now I am sweltering in the heat of Italy with a bag full of clothes that are now rendered useless.

There are 2 kinds of camps one can teach on in Italy. A City Camp or a Summer Camp. City camps are more common and it is sort of like a day camp where we teach children from 9am to 5pm and then go home to an Italian host family. Not all the families that one stays with are rich but at least almost always they live like they are rich, eat fancy things, drink fancy things and obviously, wear fancy things.

I remember 2 years ago sitting on a train in Italy on the way to some place or other and i remember seeing a woman walk onto the train. Her face was carefully drawn on with makeup, her mouth pointing down in some sort of contemptuous snarl, nails manicured to perfection, heels reaching skyward and i knew that morning and every morning there had been a precise process of outfit decision making. I sat there thinking, looking at my dirty feet, "I am so happy that i was not born an Italian woman".

ah yes, Italy again.

It's amazing how one changes in 2 years, here i am in the same place (more or less doing the same thing) and i feel as if i am a completely different person. 2 years ago, i was perhaps more adaptable to the Italian way of life. Two years ago if i was given chocolate biscuits, Nutella, espresso and milk for breakfast i would have a accepted it gratefully and been excited about the sugar injection I was giving myself. Then I would deal with hunger pains until lunch when we could eat something “real” such as a bowl of pasta, some white bread with olive oil and some sort of meat.

Well as much as I have an affection for white pasta and white bread I cannot deny how heavy and unhealthy it makes you feel, and now, being vegetarian the Italians think that I need a special substitute for the meat so they either create a whole other meal (like a second pasta) OR they give me a huge hunk of cheese. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE cheese, but a huge hunk of dried lunch cheese that they give us at camp cafettaria’s is not the Italian cheese that bounce around one’s dreams.

The fight to be healthy is almost a losing battle in Italy for they cannot comprehend why one would want fruity yoghurt and muesli for breakfast? And why would you not want to eat hot dry chips for lunch? Seeing the chips come toward me I hastily asked for half a portion, she gave me the same as the children, seeing a child’s portion as half an adults portion (which was NO child’s portion) and the other server, thinking i was being underfed, tipped the rest of her chips on my plate.

But no it isn’t just food that I feel like I am battling against. It is that wonderful useless thing called fashion. I began my journey in Milan and I am still near Milan in some little town or other and the obsession to look good is like a disease spread among all Italians. My first school was a Catholic school full of nuns and I thought my camp director was joking when she said we had to wear pants down to our shins, closed shoes and t shirts with sleeves. For the first time in 7 months I am in a hot country and they are telling me i have to cover up? So the camp director phoned my host parents saying i NEED longer shorts and so we went on a special family shopping trip to one of the biggest malls in Europe.

Malls make me uncomfortable, shopping for clothes makes me uncomfortable, well especially when I’m with someone else’s mother who is firstly Italian and secondly buying me clothes. SO we went to H&M, bypassed all the pretty clothes and they proceeded to buy me the ugliest pair of 3 quarter pants i had seen in my life for the sum total of about R250. When they saw that I did not have love in my eyes for these pants they told me they were “beautiful” and I could also wear them out with the family to restaurants etc. they were cargo pants, they were ugly but they were a gift, an expensive gift and feeling like a spoiled child I squashed my feelings of "I don’t want this" accepted it and wore it for the rest of the week.

but this kind of mentality with looking good begins to seep into you. The Italian women and men look so beautiful and elegant in their outfits and, well, I don’t always want to look like a dirty hippie, especially when I am going out with a very well to do Italian family. However, i have been living out of a bag mainly geared for winter for the past 7 months and this obviously makes such things a little difficult. One night I had conjured some sort of nice outfit out of my meager clothes and when my host father saw me he said ' Wow Mary you look-a nice" but when he saw me put on my green slipslops just before we left he was not impressed. "Mary, imagine a beautiful mountain. and at the mountain you see the mountain is-a not real, iz-a fake mountain" and I understood that somehow my green slip slops was devastatingly ruining the effect of what I was wearing.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

So we had some sort of “discussion” about how looking good is a matter of perception and I happen to like my green slip slops and I think I look nice. Well he sort of humoured my ideas but his point was firm, one should not wear second rate shoes out in high society (Or in any society at that). And all I could think was and I wanted to say “I AM NOT AN ITALIAN WOMAN AND I NEVER WILL BE”. Furthermore, I never have been one to waste much time on appearance but I realized that this i almost a cultural identity. The Irish live to get drunk, the Italians live to look good. Terrible generalizations I know, but let me just leave them hanging there for now.

Ah yes Italy, you are funny creature. That was my first camp. I have moved to another small town now but I am now living with another camp tutor in a little flat where we eat breakfast and vegetables and fruit and nuts and honey, gearing up with some healthy non-white-pasta food before we go back to live with Italian families. And we have freedom to do whatever we wish at night, to sleep, to nap, and on Friday we took a trip to the old town of Bergamo, high on a hill, piazza’s of music, drinking wine in a box listening to a Spanish guitar watching little statues lighted by churches and reveling in the magic of a summer’s night in Italy.

And yesterday we went to Lake Garda, big pristine waters, full of tourists and sexy Italians. Oh they are all sexy, I look at girls here and their faces and I wonder how they choose who gets to be a top model and who doesn’t. Their bodies are perfect, their faces structured to perfection, it is both tiring and interesting. I mean how are they ALL good looking and WHERE are the Italians that do not make the cut? Are they crying at home? It is a strange phenomenon and a part of me looks upon their bodies with a mingle of jealousy and another part of me just thinks THANK GOD I AM NOT ITALIAN! I can eat their food, I can try to speak their language but I do not have to BE Italian, I do not have to make sure I do not mix 2 different types of pasta in one pot, I do not have to uphold the fashion of the day, I do not have to be chiseled to perfection. Thank you South Africa, that for all your foibles you allow me to be anything, really, that I want.

And I am still wearing my green slip slops and no one is asking me to do otherwise, except for the despairing, disparaging looks of the Italian women who pass me by.