When the Heat Drives You Over The Cuckoo's Nest...

You know in the summer when it's blistering hot and humid outside (and I'm only speaking from experience in Virginia here) and you unlock your car to get inside and you can see the waves of heat escape and feel the torture that is about to ensue and you unwillingly lower yourself onto the hot front seat? The steering wheel is so hot you can't touch it and you either leave the door open to hopefully air out before the A/C gets cold or shut the door, roll down the windows and find a road on which you can drive as fast as you can to get some air, cool, warm, whatever, moving? Well, imagine for a hot second that you get in, shut the door, and cannot roll down the windows and there is NO A/C whatsoever and you have to sit there and conduct thorough, intelligent, involved business meetings and be completely present and alert and not freak out and get antsy that everything is sticking to you and you can feel the tickle of sweat rolling and rolling and rolling down your back and chest and under your knees and that anywhere fabric is touching is rubbing and driving you slowly, insane.
That is what teaching in this heat has been like for the past week.
Don't get me wrong, it is still incessantly beautiful and we constantly are marveling at huge spiders spinning their webs larger than any pizza you could ever find in New York. Or, the clouds that roll up over the mountains every afternoon and make us stare a bit longer at the colors and forms we've never experienced in our skies at home. Or the lizards we see skirting across our paths, the neediness and big eyes and smiles of the kids in our classes; how they drive us crazy but how we also want to squeeze them so hard their little heads pop off. Everything still takes our breath away, and yet, so does this heat.
It has been so hot I've been searching for a way to describe it to make sense of it to all of you who are pulling your winter sweaters out in preparation for early fall and chilly nights; those crisp fall mornings I love so much. And the only real relation I could find to this type of heat and the incredible lack of escape is the heated car in the summer scenario. I think it paints it pretty well.
The conversation turns into, "How are you doing?", "I'm fine, hot," "And you?", "Yes, it's hot today."
Apparently it will stay this hot until about the end of October.
Wicked.
Daily I dream of climbing the hill to my room, turning on the A/C, getting in a cold shower and spending the rest of the afternoon in the A/C not moving; it's what I've started to think about all day.
It isn't so bad until the second recess, when the kids start hanging from your waist and pulling at your every limb. Your already damp clothes start pulling and tugging at the seams and what respectful, teacherly image you hoped to portray as you walked to breakfast is quickly dismantled, disheveled. The reward is that everyone is hot and sticky, so in the end, it really doesn't matter. However, I must say that I've yet to see a Haitian really sweat. Some teachers come to work in pants or shirts and ties and I must admit that by 7 am the ink from those clothes would be penetrating my skin if I wore that to work. What a great feat of natural selection and evolution. If only...

Anyway, some pictures from the week: a potential wasp nest on my yoga mat, Esther helping me test out my paper doll chain during nap time (she never naps and is actually a very good tester, Esther), Jigens, who is and has been one of my favorites and his unfettered attention span while he masterly colors his clothed "boy" (working on girl/boy this week, going well so far, although some girls think they're boys and vice versa, my co-worker describes a girl as: long hair, bows, dresses, big breasts, and a butt that sticks out...don't think that would fly with my previous school director), Esther and Mardochee painting finished paper doll chains, my laundry and papaya trees in the background (where our cafeteria gets our morning papaya from), another glorious sunset and the huge spider we watched spin it's web last night; absolutely breathtaking.

A la prochaine!