Answer to Ron

Ron asked me how I liked this year compared to last which got me thinking. I guess the most obvious thing is that it is Sunday afternoon and I am not running around some tourist site snapping pictures. In fact, I doubt if I have posted any pictures in ages. When I see things that look like they are noteworthy of a picture, I tend to think I already have one somewhere. I guess, the real reason is I don’t even bother to take my camera with me! When I asked teachers last year what they were doing for the week-end and they kind of shrugged their shoulders as if to say, hanging around the apartment , I was flabbergasted. You mean you live in this interesting city and country and you shrug your shoulders as if there is nothing to do? Now, I guess I am them. I like nothing more than reading the paper or sitting down with a good book than run around the tourist sites, most of which I have probably seen, and more than once. As an aside, it is oppressively hot here and I know I have to go to Myanmar in a week which will be well above forty. You can be sure I am not looking forward to it. Playing golf in the heat is one thing, wearing a tie and sitting in some boring classroom is another.

Having said that, part of this journey is, of course, the people I meet and not the sites I have seen. For example, yesterday, I met a black civil rights lawyer from the United States who was taking a time out in her life and trying to get a job in Asia where she could make a difference, as she said. I met her last November as we were both apartment shopping and then met her again yesterday in a restaurant which provided us an opportunity to talk. There are so many fascinating people I have met who just want to make the world a better place and do not have the typical American attitude that their way is the better way. I offered her a job as our in house counsel in Singapore so it will be interesting if she takes up the offer.Being black in Asia, as she is, is not a help. There is such a colonial mentality throughout Asia that it certainly gives someone like me the upper hand, but we all know how crazy that is.

Which leads me to talk about my job. Last year, as you know, I was the principal of a fairly large international school so my job was easy. I was presented with myriad problems every day and all I had to do was help people solve them. In between, I tried to look ahead and anticipate challenges we were going to have and try to make suggestions to make our school better. The job came to me.

This year my job is somewhat different. I am called the Dean of the Academies and what I do is travel from country to country and school to school to help wherever and however I am needed. I have spoken to parents groups, talked individually with unhappy parents , worked inside classrooms, taught demonstration lessons, written one on-line course with Vicky and some by myself and helped with negotiations when they need an old white guy with grey hair to sit in the same room or play golf with them.

Basically, the job is what I make of it, which, on the one hand, is good, because I can do whatever turns my crank, but bad in that I have to be accountable to myself. I feel guilty if I take a day off. Right now, I am sitting in Bangkok on a beautiful Sunday afternoon as I said, not swimming, not playing golf, not site seeing, but taking a break from arranging interviews for a new school we are opening up in Hanoi ( two in fact). Unlike the principal job where problems just came to me and I had to react, here I have to act and it is the difference between night and day.

The job did give me the opportunity of meeting many wonderful people, I guess a basic theme of this answer to Ron. We have a bunch of Philippinos working at the school and they have to be the most wonderful people on earth. They love music and will at the drop of a hat burst into song. They start every class with a song and there are usually a few more somewhere in between. For some crazy reason, they think I know something and tend to treat me like an educational guru. I guess the colour of my hair, my age and my educational jargon help.

So the theme is, I have even more people this year which is great, I have travelled on the company’s dime to Yangon, Mandalay, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, and Singapore and I feel good about myself. What will it be like, I wonder, when I am no longer working? How will I make myself feel good?