A Wet Day at School

This week there was a death in the community.  An elder passed away on Saturday, so people were visiting the family on Sunday and Monday.  They bring food, or they come to eat and sing and view the body.  The body was laid out on the floor and people sat around.  In a room off to the side, several people were singing.  Others filtered in as time went by.  The tradition here is to sing all the time until the body is buried. 

Because the funeral was set for yesterday at 2, school let out early.  Everyone was at the funeral in the church.  Some sat on the floor inside, where the body rested in a coffin.  Others, like me, stood around in the entryway or outside the doors.  The church is Russian Orthodox, and the service was done in song.  At the end people took turns saying goodbye to the body.

Today is another rainy day in Akula.  My co-teacher and I decided that the change in scheduling yesterday, the weather and the full moon today created a perfect storm of antsy kids.    All day, our students were fidgeting and day-dreaming.  I was exhausted by 10:00 when we took them to gym.  After gym I had my first-graders sitting on the rug while we did an exercise on sliding letters to make words.  The first thing I remember seeing was a drop of liquid seeping into the knee of one of my student’s pants.  As my eyes traveled upward, I saw his hands cupped in front of him and then his wide eyes staring at me.  His hands were full of saliva, but I didn’t make the connection in time to catch myself from asking “what’s in your hands?” so that he help them out to me obediently.  The knee of his pants was soaked, and I walked him to the sink so that he wouldn’t touch anything as he went.  As I walked back to the rug to resume my lesson I was thinking about all the possibilities of what had happened- did he seriously save up saliva in his mouth and spit it into his hands?  I sat down again and looked at my students, just as one of them let a drop of mucus fall from his mouth to the carpet.  It sat on top of the carpet like jell-o while he went to get a paper towel to clean it up.  I was trying to keep my teacher face on, but I had to laugh. 

I am about to go to the post office, which is a 30 second walk from the school.  The road is muddy on a clear day, but with the rain it will be a swamp.  Sometimes kids follow me over, hoping I’ll get a package with food in it, but today they’re all inside.  That will give me a chance to recharge for tomorrow morning.  Who knows what could happen then.