Crazy in Love — Vientiane, Laos | December 2003
“And so this is Xmas? ”
It’s Christmas and, as this isn’t a holiday in Laos, I’m at work. My students are working in groups and I’m idly staring out of the window. I see palm trees and the silhouette of a temple in the distance. Suddenly it hits me: I’m really here, standing in a classroom in Vientiane, teaching English literature to an eager group of Lao students.
It’s been a very hectic year, which is probably why it’s never really sunk in before. I permanently left the Netherlands about a year ago. I started work as an English teacher at the Logos Academy in Vientiane, but after three months of feeling very incompetent as a teacher — teaching Lao civilians is quite a different experience from teaching Dutch soldiers — I decided to quit. This to the surprise of Logos director David Chung.
“But…but… the students really like you,” he stammered.
That was news to me! I felt sorry for David, but after three months of sweating through eerily quiet classes, I’d had enough. Also, I’d already found a new job, English teacher at the Thames Business College in Pakse in the south of Laos.
Pakse was quite an experience, with only two teachers on staff at the newly established Thames Business College, our classes were very large. Mine consisted of 46 pre-elementary students ranging in age from 12 to 50, and the only material available to me was a picture dictionary.
For four months, I created stories together with my class, using the vocabulary from the page of the picture dictionary. One day we would virtually cook a meal together, learning the words for the different kinds of meat and vegetables together with verbs like ‘to chop’ and ‘to slice’, while on another day we would decorate the ideal home.
One of the highlights was the Great Pakse Grocery Race of June 2003. After we’d covered the vocabulary for common groceries, I divided the class into small groups and gave them a grocery list. I then sent them off into the city to shop and the first group to return with all the items on the list would win the race.
Pakse is a small town and so for days after the race, the buzz on the street was about my students who’d gone shopping and had refused to speak anything but English while buying their items in Lao shops.
It was fun but after four long months I felt too bored with life outside of work. The whole of Pakse basically shut down at around 8pm. There was really nothing to do, so I decided to move back to Vientiane.
Ironically, on the day I returned to Vientiane, the Government announced a curfew ordering all bars, restaurants and clubs to close by 10pm to ‘protect’ Lao culture. Vientiane was still a lot livelier than Pakse though, and so I went around looking for a new job.
After a few days, I found one at the Lao-Singapore College, but this didn’t last long as the college decided to raise their tuition fees and lost their students.
Once again searching for a job, I found myself at the Lao-American College. I didn’t feel quite qualified to teach at an American college but decided to leave my CV at the reception anyway. When I got back to my guesthouse there was a message from the college to please call back.
I did, and here I am, standing in front of 30 Lao students at the Lao-American College’s Vientiane campus, teaching English literature. Last week we finished our review of Melville’s Moby Dick and at the moment we’re reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette: fascinating!
Beyoncé ft Jay-Z. Crazy in Love on Dangerously in Love [CD]. New York City, USA: Sony Music Studios (2003)
This autobiographical sketch comes from my bundle In the Moment: A Disjointed Audiobiography which is available at Amazon.com. (USD 9.50 for a paperback or USD 4.50 for the Kindle version)
