Some students of Sapa O'Chau

This is Chi, a student I have no issue saying is probably the most endearing I've had in my time at Sapa O'Chau. She, along with Ha, came into school about a week after I started, both girls wily veterans of the outdoor markets. It's a huge sacrifice for them and their families back in the villages to have their daughters live at the campus instead of making good money hawking their handmade wares to tourists throughout the day. It's what Chi has been doing for years, and as a team, her and Ha were very good at it. Despite the draw of good money, Chi has thrown herself headfirst into school, not only learning how to write proper letters and words, but learning how to READ English in a matter of weeks (by no means is the credit all mine; I worked with 6 other teachers). Chi even had enough gumption to separate herself from the comfortable desk next to her good friend Ha in order to focus more, parking herself right next to me in the front of the class. As is the case anywhere in the world when you are entering a new school, a lot of the students at Sapa O'Chau are timid and afraid to speak up, made all the more difficult because it is a language class. Chi never once had a moment's hesitation, and it's not because she is what one would coin naturally fearless - she just really wants to learn and has the perfect mixture of attitude and effort. Chi, along with Lan, always took it upon themselves to bail me out when the rest of the class was either too tired or simply refused to answer questions I'd pose to them as a group. What made Chi's effort extra sweet was that she would shout out an answer just to help me out, even though she knew herself she hadn't a prayer of getting it correct. She's simply one of those dream students you hope you have when you head into jobs like this, or really, any teaching job. She also really reminds me of my little neice Bella!

In the photo, I'm showing off a bracelet she made as a thank you gift for me. As you will see in the ensuing pictures, I've posed with every student who was so thoughtful and giving enough to actually make me a gift for being their teacher. Bracelets, satchels, and belts were not the only gifts I got.  I received plenty of wonderful hand written letters from my students, where I've been reading one each night since leaving Sapa this past Sunday. 

If Chi reminded me of Bella, Lee here reminded me of my little neice Amanda! The same tough, steely resolve, the same insane work ethic, and is it just me, or does she somewhat resemble Amanda, too? Lee takes not only 5 hours of English lessons a day, she also takes nightly Hmong and Vietnamese lessons, as well as weekend classes at another school. So she gets zero days off throughout the week and, understandably so, often looks very tired. If you've ever taught a class, you would know how important it is to be consistent with all of the students, to not give any special privileges to anyone, lest you want a chaotic classroom full of entitled children. However, whenever Lee protested my request for her to do something in front of the class, I must admit, I backed down. It just seemed so out of character, plus I knew her busy workload, so if she flat out refused to do something, I could either chalk it up to "she's overworked" or the very convenient 'cultural sensitivity' excuse, that maybe it was some cultural violation for me to ask her to put on a hat in order to demonstrate a clothing vocabulary lesson.

Being so busy, Lee admitted to me that she didn't have the time to hand-make a gift, so instead, went down to the market to purchase a cell-phone pouch and a little pillow keychain accessory. A gift in any shape or form is beyond sweet and obviously unnecessary, but to have her go out and buy one for me made me very uncomfortable. Keep in mind my students, when we go on treks, either purposefully run away from me when they make purchases at stores so that I don't have to buy them anything, or take a really long time grappling with the fact that I just offered to buy them a 50 cent soda after six hours of walking. My students' humility and pride marvels me every time I think about it. 

I think of Lan as the matriarch of Sapa O'Chau (if you exclude Shu, the director of the school, of course). She arrived to school barely before I got there, but the command and respect she has of the other students must have been immediate, because when Lan barks, which is rare, but when she barks, the other girls sure listen. Chi led by example when it came to policing the class, and Lan led by letting rip a trademark admonishment in Hmong that I'm glad I didn't understand. If I have led you to believe that the class as a whole were very unruly, that wouldn't be accurate. To sit in a language class for five hours a day is not easy, and one would understand if you had a few moments during the day when you as a student would let your attention run astray. However, it sure helped having students like Lan around to self-appoint herself judge, jury, executioner. 

Of course Lan had a lighter side. On one of my weekend treks, Lan and Su were the teachers' guides, where we stayed in Ta Phin at a Red Dzao homestay. The girls jumped right in and helped the Red Dzao women prepare a perfect Vietnamese dinner, so subtle and so full of flavor. Sitting around a fire after dinner (I'll take a nice warm fire over dessert any day of the week), Lan started giggling uncontrollably, and it was pretty obvious that the laughter was directed at me. She was conversing like rapid fire with the Red Dzao women, in a way that seemed very out of character for what I'd known of Lan. I didn't want to interrupt, but I had to interject and ask Lan what exactly was so funny. As I had said before, she's a pretty new student to Sapa O'Chau, so her English is relatively limited, so all she said was "Chicken", followed by an amusing cackle she could certainly call her own. I just laughed along with her, not wanting to ruin her rapport with the Red Dzao homeowners, and also not wanting to interrupt her good time by pestering her for more English. But by saying I was laughing along with her, I'm not saying I was faking my laughter. It was genuinely hilarious, her repeatedly saying "Chicken" and having her laughter grow stronger each time she said it. I found myself saying "Chicken" and sincerely laughing just as hard, right along with her, us two trading laughter, with only one of us knowing the entire story.

I don't remember the exact moment the mystery was solved, but shortly after, I was informed that "Chicken" referred to this crew of roosters that hang outside the farm, as roosters tend to do I suppose. Instead of cockadoodle-doodling at the break of dawn as I was led to believe is the norm, these guys liked to do their thing at 3 in the morning. So the sadistic laughter provided by Lan turned out to actually be about sadism. She was getting a huge kick of the difficult night of sleep I was about to endure.

Sure enough, those roosters did kick in at the promised time, as I kept my phone next to me in order to see if these guys were really that coordinated. It was a crew of four roosters which formed the night's a capella ensemble, taking turns in shockingly coordinated fashion, going at it every fifteen minutes for a couple hours straight. That fifteen minute interval was especially cruel, where it allowed me to fall asleep just long enough to experience that rude awakening four times an hour. 

I saw Lan the next morning, and she looked pretty chipper. I looked at her, said "Chicken", and let out a few fake laughs. She looked back at me, shrieked back"Chicken", yet only this time, her laughter was far louder than it had ever approached the night before.

Dem is a student I didn't really get to know until about the last week and a half or so of class. The classes at Sapa O'Chau had only recently gone co-ed, and I heard that the arrival of boys ushered in a new kind of timidity and apprehension that just wasn't there when it was an all-girls school. When we would do group activities that would involve the most minimal amount of physical contact between the boys and girls, we were either met with flat out refusal or insatiable giggling fits. Flat out refusal is frustrating and slightly embarrassing for a teacher, especially when it was entirely unanticipated, but giggling, for my money's worth, grew to be far more difficult. And head scratching. If it's not pretty obvious, I'm fond of all of the students I've had in Sapa, but it doesn't mean every single moment at the school was a day at Astroworld. Maybe it's a strange human reaction to be so perplexed by constant giggling, but for the first few weeks, some of the girls were definitely guilty of this, and as their new teachers, we didn't want to be the anti-fun police that disallowed laughter, but it can obviously get in the way of productivity if not reigned in. It never really seemed malicious, either, so I had a hard time trying to put a stop to it. 

Anyway, Dem (pronounced Zem) was probably the biggest culprit when it came to these inopportune moments of laughing fits. It was hard to police with her because she almost always did her work promptly, would pitch in when it came time to speak out loud in class, and was rarely ever disruptive. Except when she would laugh uncontrollably over something I have no clue about. 

One lesson, in the middle of class, I think I asked her to participate in some way, and there she went, laughing again. I didn't try to stop it, I just abandoned the idea that she would contribute in any productive way, so I just turned my attention to another student to maintain the flow of class. After the group lesson, the students were doing individual work, and I isolated her by asking her a concept check question, to see if she understood the lesson. She looked at me and started giggling again. "There is nothing funny," I said. Really, there wasn't anything that was funny at the moment. And I think it really dawned on her, too, because she stopped laughing, after probably a minute straight of giggling, then answered my question. Maybe Dem finally exasperated herself. I know it wasn't what I said, "There is nothing funny", that did it, because surely, I've said that to her before, no? I think during that short moment I had with Dem, when she finally understood, I probably had a really frightening look on my face, a reflection of the cold, stern David that lurks deep inside the dark recesses of his tortured psyche.

It worked. For the last two weeks or week and a half, Dem was Lan part II, sitting on the opposite end of the class, cracking her whip when she found it necessary. As I said, she was never a bad student, but her effort to stop laughing, and to actually stop, was really dear to me. I hope I let her know in class that her efforts at improvement were really appreciated by me.

I feel there must be some typos and lot of cumbersome wording here, but so be it. I'll fix it when I choose to re-read this. All I want you to take away from this post is that laughter is forbidden in my class.

***many more students to come in ensuing posts.