Six months later

Yesterday was the six month point of my stay in Modica, and it was also the day that my friend, also called Laura, who arrived in Modica the same day as me to be an au pair, went back to England.  It’s strange to have lost the person who has lived this experience simultaneously to me from the beginning, and we will miss her so much.  All this, combined with a visit from one of my best friends from home with whom the biggest catch-up was overdue, has left me thinking about my experience so far: how I would even start to go about explaining what I’ve done, seen and learnt so far this year, particularly in context of what I expected to achieve and experience.  I should point out that I did launch into this year like a bit of a leap into the dark, I couldn’t really envisage what my life would be like, but here we go anyway.

I was told before coming that it would be so great for my Italian to come out here, where nobody speaks English and I’ll be thrown into the depths of provincial Southern Sicily.  Well, yes and no.  My previous time abroad has been in Perugia, a cosmopolitan international town in Italy which experiences a constant and large influx of foreign students going there to learn Italian, so the easiest and quickest friends to make are fellow foreigners.  You cling together in your collective foreign-ness, spotting characteristics of your host country and being united in your non-belonging.  However, it being an Italian university town means that there are also Italian students, and other Italian people, to make friends with, and given their constant exposure to foreigners, they are not confused by your presence in Italy or your foreign-ness, and if they chose to be friends with you, they don’t see the different nationality as an insurmountable boundary to a nice friendship.

Here, people are not used to foreigners, and though it would be catastrophically unfair to even imply that I’ve encountered hostility, the Sicilians don’t particularly see me as a potential equal as much as a fascinating novelty, therefore not particularly as a potential friend.  The vast majority of what I encounter is friendly but persistent and shameless curiosity and something bordering on amazement, and a fair deal of downright confusion.  I have had 4 visits from family/friends from home, and each of them has commented on the level of attention I get from people here.  I went out on Saturday with my group of English friends, and although I didn’t keep count, we got approached by around 10 guys, speaking to us in frankly shocking English, asking us why we were in Modica (and probably trying to pursue some other objective too, you couldn’t really understand from their level of English, and if I’m not interested in the conversation, it can be easier not to let on that I know Italian.)

I work in two schools, and the further away one is around 50 minutes walk away, in the modern part of town.  People don’t tend to walk to places here, much less out of the historical centre, so the fact to see not just any person, but a tall blonde foreigner, walking over there is stunning for them.  They don’t have our cultural trait of pretending not to notice someone/something, so they shamelessly stare, turning their heads and slowing down in their cars.  I have a deep level of acceptance for the nature of my life here - I realised about 5 months and 25 days ago that this would be a feature of my time there, and I know it’s so strange for them to have me here, and they mean no harm and certainly no offence by this behaviour.  However, I do, if I think about it too much, find it deeply exasperating.  Yes, I know I’m foreign, and I’ve noticed how much of a minority I am here too.  It would be great if you could actually see me as the same species as you, just with a funny accent and a different heritage.  

I should note, though, that I am generalising.  The people at work, be it my fellow English teachers (all Sicilian nationality) or my students, have been so friendly and so curious to hear everything I have to say, and have been the saving grace of my life here.  My job is effectively to be foreign at school - teach them about my language and culture - and it is one that I absolutely believe in, I am delighted to do and I really enjoy doing.  Cliched as it sounds, I have never wavered in my belief that these kids need to learn about languages and countries beyond Sicily and Italy, and my work, which I do with such pleasure, is met with appreciation and enthusiasm.

The expectation that I would be fully immersed in Sicilian culture and Italian language, though, has not been fulfilled.  I am too foreign, too strange.  My hope would be to be a token English person at work, but then go and live a Sicilian life in the rest of my time, but that hasn’t been possible.  The cultural isolation can at times be very lonely.  I thank my lucky stars time and time again for having a lovely group of English friends here, and a friendly and sociable job.

There’s the foreign thing I’ve spoken about so far, and also I so don’t fit into the demographic here.  People my age have generally left Modica to more fruitful study or work opportunities.  Those who stay are with their families.  Life here is so rooted in families, all of whom in Modica seem to know each other or at least know of each other, it feels impossible to break into the social side of life as an outsider.

So, it is with some apprehension that I acknowledge the extent of my non-integration here.  The fact that all of my social life is with English friends is something that that, I’ve been told, should be categorically avoided in one’s year abroad.  But come on, what am I meant to do?  

When I’m feeling like I’ve really bypassed some of the fundamental objectives of the year abroad, though, I give myself a reality check.  Due in equal part to being observant for six months and to listening to what my students chat to me about in their English classes, I feel like I have got a precious and frankly life-changing insight into a culture that is vastly different from my own.  Every day I go into a state school, which is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of a country, and I am so well-versed in the ins and outs of their education system that I will bore any poor victim for hours at a time upon my return to England (n.b. I find it fascinating).  I am also doing a lot of traveling in Sicily - enough to make me feel like I really am understanding this country.  

And really, if we’re honest, an anxiety and longing of ‘what might have been’ vs ‘what is’ is one of the unhappy companions of life.  The fact of being foreign in such a mono-cultural place, and the isolation of that, is such a challenge of being here.  However, it is such a rich and enlightening experience that I am only just becoming able to untangle what I’m doing and thinking into a coherent set of ideas.  When I think about it though, cards on the table, knowing what I know now about the big highs and big lows, the rewards and the real difficulties I encounter, I genuinely do think I would still come to Modica to be a language assistant if I was making my choice again.  For all of the expectations and hopes I probably had before I came out here, the biggest hope must have been to not feel I made a mistake by giving myself too big a challenge, and I don’t.

I booked my flight today - I’m coming back to England on the 6th June, which is precisely 9 months after my arrival in Modica.  The coincidence of when flights were cheap and convenient has given a very pleasing neatness to the year abroad.  My hope is for the spring to be my nicest time in Modica.  I am very settled here in that I really do know the place well, and my job has settled into the nice level of challenge that keeps me occupied and working hard, and gives me a purpose when I wake up in the morning, but rarely seems too difficult to have fun.  In the last few days, walking around town, or on one occasion along the beach, it felt very much like the nice weather is barely round the corner now, and after all of this reflection I feel content: pleased with what I have achieved, and ready and optimistic for how I’ll live my last 12 weeks of the year abroad.

When it's all worthwhile

What with the whole ‘gap yah’ mocking, it’s actually quite difficult to talk about experiences like the one I’m doing at the moment without falling into mockable cliches, so it is with a certain amount of self-consciousness that I launch into this post about the ups and the downs of this whole year abroad of mine.

It is a very socially challenging thing being out here - I’m far far away from lots of things and people that I would really like to be near, and in this particular town there really isn’t that much social life to be had.  I have found my English friends, without whom I would be fairly lost, and luckily my colleagues and students are wonderful, but the pivotal part of my life here is undoubtedly work.  That is, after all, the reason I was sent to this particular place.

As I’ve said before, I’ve been very lucky to a) be placed in a lovely school and b) to actively enjoy my job.  However, my overall happiness sort of depends on how things are going there - a bad week leads to me wondering what I’m doing all the way out here.  I’ve never lost faith in what I’m doing, but sometimes have doubted my ability to do it.  This week is turning out to be a cracker work-wise.  Through equal measures of fluke and hard work, my classes have gone better than ever.  I have felt, more than at any point of this year so far, that I’m really getting the hang of this job that I’m not trained to do and have intermittedly felt very out of my depth doing.

I’ve now been out here for nearly six months, so I’m starting to allow myself to see the big picture, with the odd fleeting thought about how I’ll look back at this year.  I can’t say precisely how I’ll be thinking back on it, but I certainly want to remember the great times at work.  This week has included: singing ‘Lemon Tree’ with (or maybe just at) my class of 14-year-olds, drilling the difference between ‘beach’ and ‘bitch’, asking my students if Modica was bigger or smaller than New York, and solving a murder mystery.  For all of the low moments of the experience, weeks like this when I feel like I’m doing a good job and having fun doing it, actually do make me feel like this is the right thing to be doing in my life.

The reluctant students

I barely ever hold my classes uninterrupted for a week - there are so many assemblies, presentations, bank holidays, special events, elections for class representatives, consultations with the higher up members staff... the list goes on.  Every now and then would still be a bit surprising, but understandable.  The fact is that it’s just all the time that a class is cancelled or rescheduled.

The other day my timetable was changed at the last minute, which made a big clash, and so that meant I missed three hours of lessons.  I was stressed and apologised adequately, and everyone was just like ‘look, this is what it’s like over here, it’s not your fault, you need to get used to the mentality we have here’.  The teacher I was chatting to today, who is the colleague I should have been with on Tuesday, explained that the class I was most looking forward to seeing, the 5B, was almost completely absent.  I was understandably confused.  She explained.  In Italian schools, as I knew, they do continuous assessment throughout the year.  At the end of the year, they average out the marks and they only advance to the next year if they average at least 6 out of 10.  There is no public moderation though, there are no external examiners, it’s just the teacher.  So it turns out that the 5B had a test that day.  A common way to cope with the sudden stress of an exam you haven’t studied for is to get the whole class on board and not turn up.  The 4A, another of my classes, also did the same that day: out of a class of 28, only 2 were there.

There is no contingency plan for a class who is absent on a test day.  For as long as the test is on the cards, the students aren’t gonna come, the teacher can’t fail them all because they’d have a year group with no students in (or maybe just two, those two that turned up), so they’re at a stalemate.  The teacher gives out low marks, the kids come to class again.  It’s absurd.

It’s important not to generalise too much.  I have had so many experiences in these schools that I’ve found interesting and noteworthy, but the above only happens in one of my two schools, and they definitely do do their tests some of the time.  However, just the fact that a whole class can just not come is difficult to get your head round.

Life eh?

I love Miranda Hart, fully and entirely, I feel that her and Bridget Jones together give me instruction, direction and reassurance in a life that, at times, feels so totally bizarre that I just wonder how on earth this is all happening to me.  I know that I am experiencing the very same word as everyone else, I am under no illusion of being special in my bizarre experiences of the world, but Miranda Hart’s audiobook (finished this afternoon, highly recommended), provided me with the wonderful above phrase, 'life eh?' to express the sentiment succinctly.  When you look around you and have an almost out of body WHAT IS GOING ON moment.  It's a fun, almost unnerving thing, that you can allow to just rock your mind for a moment before you need to get on with it.

Strange things that have happened to me since I’ve been back in Sicily since Christmas:

1. I have taken an increasing amount of lessons entirely on my own.  Now, in Italian schools, the bidello (caretaker guy, called Roberto), often breezes in with some kind of notice or announcement that the teacher needs to read to the class.  In this particular class, I was on my own, so instead of giving the notice to the teacher, he gave it to me.  In the spirit of teaching my classes entirely in English, I have not corrected the students’ assumption that I do not speak or understand Italian, but I do chat to Roberto between lessons so he did not see the issue in coming in and talking to me.  To the students, it was absurd that he should ask me to read out a notice in Italian, and they all shouted at him that I didn’t understand.  Roberto enjoyed the attention, so smiled and joked back a little bit, which amused the students greatly.  Within about 60 seconds it had descended into absolute hysteria, Roberto was playing to the audience, saying ‘I’m Sicilian!  I’m from Ispica!  You can’t expect me to speak English!’.  The students were literally weeping with laughter from the hilarity of it all, still trying to shout to Roberto between gasps that he really wasn’t going to manage to communicate with me.  I sat on the desk and had a drink of water, and let them all calm down.  One of my most wonderful and responsible students took control of the situation, took the notice from Roberto and did the necessary short administration task.  Roberto left, and I asked my students to calm down and carry on with the activity.  They obeyed, which gave me a great rush of gratitude and affection for my lovely students, and felt secretly pretty amused by the whole thing.

2. Last weekend I spent a wonderful weekend in Palermo with the other language assistants who have been placed in Sicily.  I can't emphasise how great it is to chill for a few days with people who are having the same experience as me.  Amongst other activities, we discussed our mutual puzzlement of bdays, so in order to clear up the confusion, Rebecca read us the Wikihow of ‘How to use a bday’ out loud in the cafe.  I felt very happy to have found people with whom such activities are acceptable.

3. On Monday, I arrived at school impressively early.  I was feeling refreshed from an amazing few days, but also tired from a late night journey back, so I felt a little on the back foot.  Lessons start at 08.10am, and at 08.05am there was a phone call.  Turns out my colleague Sabrina wouldn’t be in school this week.  The teachers in the staff room set about sorting who could cover which lessons, but the first thing they said was ‘well, today is okay because there’s Laura’.  I do always plan and deliver my own lessons, but Sabrina is there with me in class to give me back up if I need it, and I’ve not done an entire school day on my own before.  I got a bit nervous, but went up to class, explained to them that it was just me so please could they be nice, and they were.  I did a lesson on William and Kate (a request from one of the students - ‘Miss, as Laura’s English, can she talk to us about William and Kate?’), and then two lessons on body parts.  In the first lesson, one of my students added a penis to his labelled diagram of the body, and in the second lesson I treated the class to a rendition, or actually two renditions, of ‘heads shoulders knees and toes'

Me: If I teach you a song, will you sing it?

Them: no

Me: but it’s a really good song, come on, you’ll like it

Them: we don’t want to sing

Me: I’ll sing it the first time, and then the second time you can sing it with me.  Stand up and copy my actions

They stand up.  They’re my youngest class, so I always refer to them as ‘my little ones’ (not to their face).  Turns out that they’re actually much bigger than I thought.  Well, they are 14/15 years old.  I realise I’m about to perform ‘heads shoulders knees and toes’ to a group of year 9s and I really can’t back out of it

Me: ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes....’

They laugh a lot.  They don’t join in with the second rendition, so it is just me singing it twice.

4. I had a group skype session with my wonderful university friends.  I don’t have internet in my house, so I need to skype from the cafe.  This was a golden opportunity for them, who waved at everyone else in the bar, put a bra up for show on the screen and had a lovely dance along session.  As if I wasn’t conspicuous enough for speaking a foreign language to my laptop in public, I had a screenful of fun for anyone who happened to be looking around the cafe.

In my life I often think of the freeze frame moment about five minutes into Bridget Jones, when she walks past Mark Darcy at the turkey curry buffet with her dignity in tatters, and it is at precisely that point in her life that she realises how much of a state everything is.  I’ve actually had a really great few days, but I also think just how did anyone think of putting me all the way abroad, and not only that, but in charge of large groups of teenagers and expecting me to educate them?!  I think it’s because I slotted in so easily when I was back in England for the holidays that I’ve felt a bit disorientated back here.  There was a bit of the negative January blues stuff, but recently there’s been a lot more of the positive but surreal ‘how is this happening to me’ stuff.

I’m pretty precisely half way through my job now, and I wonder if it will stop being strange that I walk into this Italian state school and they seem to think ‘oh yeah, this seems like a reasonable person to put at the front of the class’.  

Back to it

It was a bit over a year ago that I was discussing with my university friends whether to apply for this assistantship or not.  My worries were that I would arrive in a dead-end town in the middle of nowhere and be very bored and lonely.  I remember the conversation, my wonderful flatmates told me that it wouldn’t be the easiest experience I could choose, but it would be what I made of it and I could learn a lot from it.  I thought about it for a bit, and then chose to apply.

It has been in that vain that I’ve been carrying out this year.  My job has been above anything else a wonderful highlight of the year so far, but it’s also been more challenging than I was expecting, having been given a comparable amount of responsibility as an average teacher, albeit untrained and only a 21-year-old student.  The town is beautiful, and I feel privileged to be in such a pretty, safe and welcoming place, though I can’t deny that I wish the social side was more substantial.

I am mindful of all of this in the last few days coming back after the Christmas holidays.  It is reassuring that everyone I know seems to regard the first day back with an impending sense of doom and struggle with the readjustment at first.  It felt funny that I was coming back here after the nourishing comfort and familiarity of being with my family and friends over Christmas, and it took a little bit of self-coaching to get back to the positive mindset that I’ve held onto so far.  It seemed strange that the time in my own country was actually a holiday, and for the moment my life is out here.  

Yesterday I had a good day at work.  I had all of my favourite classes and they were happy to see me, and I them, and they were for the most part happy and receptive to follow the lesson, and we had a laugh too.  Basically it was my job on a good day, which was what I needed.  I think that the end of the visit in your own country is bound to be a low point of living abroad, but it’s okay really.  Remembering why I’m here and the lovely positive aspects of my life here, along with how that fits in with my expectations before getting here, makes a huge difference.  

Caos, confusione, bordello, casino

The above words all refer to a very Italian range of situations.  The rough translation is chaos, but that doesn't quite capture it.  It is not a very complex linguistic theory that a language has words that correspond to aspects of its culture, so in this case Italian has at least four words to refer to something that English can't properly capture.  The words can refer to general disorganisation of a person or group, or to a big traffic jam, or to an argument, or other things.  Well, literally 'bordello' and 'casino' actually mean 'brothel', so literally speaking they're going round saying 'what brothel!'.  Looking at the colloquial use, though, there seems to be a kind of essence in all of these situations that is so quintessentially Italian, at least to my foreign and stereotypical eyes.

People seem to take some pleasure in it, and I must admit that I'm thinking and writing about it with some fondness: much as I don't particularly think it's the way to live your life it is kind of endearing when it's a feature of your host culture.  A good example was when I was in the car in Catania.  My friend was driving, and despite moaning about 'what bordello, what confusione', he sounded his horn at every, and i mean every opportunity.  When I asked why, he said 'because we're in Catania'.  He explained that in theory you're not meant to sound your horn in the centre, but in practice people often actually break their horns from overuse.

Another example was my students talking excitedly about a school trip, again to Catania, that we went on this Tuesday.  They were trying to say that they're going to go and 'make confusione… Laura how do we say that in English?'.  They meant they were going to hang out and mess about and be silly… maybe I'm not that articulate, or maybe I'm right that it's difficult to quite capture.  They were right though - we went to the theatre, and I've never known such a participative audience.  It was only 'Waiting for Godot', hardly a lively and participative play, but they were shouting out and clapping along absolutely whenever they could.

For a Brit, every sense of these words is counter-intuitive, but although I do on occasion want them to shush (in lessons would be nice), it is quite fun.

The Sweetest Students

I shouldn’t have favourite classes, but there are definitely ones that I look forward to.  5A on a Tuesday morning is very firmly in that category, they are a bright, conscientious and enthusiastic class who I love teaching.  Today I was around 3 minutes late to their lesson because I’d been disorganised photocopying worksheets, and the other teacher had gone ahead of me to the classroom.  In her presence and my absence the students had got antsy, and when I came in they actually cheered a bit, and laughed and smiled.  It was one of the nicest welcomes into a room I’ve had in my life.

I have a bit of a sniffly cold at the moment and my voice was cracking a little through the lesson and I was feeling a bit grotty and sorry for myself, so I asked them to not make me raise my voice, and they were absolutely wonderful to me.  I just stood at the front and looked at them when I wanted them to stop their activity, and they shushed each other and listened to me.

Though this is a particularly extreme example, I realise more than ever that I am incredibly lucky to have polite and kind students.  It’s a two-way process of course, and they would have none of this respect for me if I didn’t think they were fairly wonderful in return, but I came out of that lesson feeling like I’ve been landed, through no merit of my own, into the best school ever.