An eventful fortnight

This'll be a quick one cos it's Oskie's birthday tomorrow.

I've done the balloons and Niki's iced the cake but there's still presents to wrap and streamers to put up and it's getting on for midnight. It's a particularly big occasion for him not just because he's three, or because he's finally getting a skateboard (and talked about nothing else for the last three months) – these things are big enough, but today was the day he gave up his dummies. You know, those pacifier things; all 5 of his beloved dodies were traded in this afternoon at CheapSkates for an outrageously oversize lime green skateboard. Bless him, he can't even look at it without falling over but he gave the man his precious rubber teats without so much as a grimace and went almost straight off to sleep tonight without them. And he wasn't well; he's had a nasty cough for a few days and went to bed with a bit of a temperature. His last words before drifting off were, predictably enough, "but I want them!"

Nice one, Calpol...

It's all big events round here at the moment. The Festival of Lights was a sight bigger than we expected, the town completely choc full of people on the final night, kind of like a sedated Spanish Fiesta Major complete with stage entertainment and even a churrerira stand. The churros were ok, considering the distance the recipe had to travel and the Brazillian-French team that were running the stand. Typical Kiwi catering. Wacky food was everywhere, involving fundraisers for local schools and a mulled white wine which completely erased my memory of everything else on offer. All in all it was a pretty spectacular event for a little harbour town. I've put some pics up on the LosNemo gallery site.

There's news on the job front too. Niki's been making progress with local schools and, as predicted, the best leads have come from personal contacts. She had a few days relieving work (that's Kiwi for "supply teaching") at a big city-centre school, full of brutal pre-teens but still miles better than the one she was at up north... and an interview at a Catholic school in New Brighton that turned up some interesting part-time possibilites. It's looking like a combination of part-time and relieving will work out best (and probably best-paid) if only because the real prize – promised sessions of Spanish teaching at the local Steiner school – then remains a viable proposition. Fingers are crossed. Me, I'm still not absolutely sure what's going to come my way but it's currently looking like construction work might be looming on the horizon again. And not just any old construction work: I might have an entire house to build before too long.

I've been saving the biggest event til last, even though it actually appeared first. See that view over the harbour in the photo? Nice picnic spot, no? Just above where we're living at the moment, too. Well, we might have just accidentally kind of bought it, sorta thing. We were chatting with a neighbour who mentioned the land was up for sale, said she'd had her eye on it for some time, dropped a very big hint that the owner was extremely keen to offload it, so we put a daft offer in. Which he turned down of course but we still ended up getting it for a really good price. The rest of the month has been a meetings and drawings and plannings and overall, a slowly-kindling hope is evemrging that we might be able to get the whole thing off the ground by the time we come to move out of the place we're in now.

People we're talking to are speaking of a council planning department suddenly free of backlogs, presumably (like everywhere) due to the lack of building going on in the region, able to turn what used to be an 18-month approval process into something much more immediate, for the right kind of application. If we can keep it simple, within known limits, the fact that our land already has outline planning permission means we might even get it down to so many weeks. Naturally, this has me thinking we can possibly afford to push our luck... we'd love to build something out of the earth, rather than just pour concrete all over it. Wattle and daub? Almost... there's a long, fairly strong tradition here of rammed earth construction, just like poured concrete but using compacted clay-based soil instead: exactly the sort of soil we have here, in fact. As our place will be quite conspicuous, we're keen to make it blend in as much as possible and you can't get much more incognito than a mud hut on a hillside.

Will the town planners like the idea? Well, the nice thing about this place is, you can just walk into their office and ask them. It's way more open and informal than anywhere else we've ever lived. You meet these people and they're just incredibly personable and helpful, plus it's such a small town; you get to know a proper local and they just seem to know everyone and go out of their way to introduce you to the right people. It makes the idea of building here much less intimidating and living here a genuinely positive, exciting prospect.

We'll see. We haven't even paid for the land yet...

I did mention the new album in the LosNemo gallery earlier but it's becoming customary to include a link at the end so here it is: Link. You'll want the "Late June"album for the most recent pics. Finally, a solemn promise to post up the birthday party pics there. Like, as soon as possible. Hey, c'mon, I've got a lot on my plate these days...

Packing it all in

The kids are quite keen to leave...

Wow, three weeks since my last post. Notice I say my last post; Niki hasn't blogged for so long I've pretty much taken over sole responsibility for the thing, so it's maybe not surprising that it never gets done. A bit like the housework I should be doing instead of typing this, it's a question of priorities and there's a definite pecking order, ie, if the housework needs doing, there's always something more important to be getting on with.

We haven't been ridiculously busy, really. There's been more to do than usual – I've been working (or attempting to, during the 5-hour slot I get, four days a week) and for some reason Niki's job seems to be taking up loads more of her time this term – but that's not why I've not been blogging. Ironically, there's been loads to blog about, just for one reason or another it hasn't been worth saying until now.

It all started out with a pain in the arse. To be more precise, it was several pains in the arse at once, both figurative and real, which turned out to be loosely interconnected and centering on our Niki. She came home from school one day with a shooting pain down one leg. If you've ever had a shooting pain but never actually been shot, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you've been unfortunate enough to have been shot but never so unlucky to have had sciatica at the time, maybe you won't. Anyway, that was one pain, the other was more of an intense suffering, brought on by being obliged to teach in what we now know to be (unofficially, but fairly unanimously) the worst Primary school* in the country.

The third is the figurative pain in the arse that runs the place. Actually she only figuratively runs the place nowadays, having been usurped by a Ministry lackey with functional people skills and a brief to pull the place into shape. The reality is, she's been sent to treat a decapitation with a Band-Aid. A rubbish school and disrespectful Principal not only feed off each other, they produce rubbish, disrespectful kids. Leaving aside the entire generation of failed pre-teens the place is turning out, it turns over teachers at a shocking rate. Niki was her class' fourth teacher last year and she won't be their last one this year: the fact is, she's leaving at the end of the term and we're all heading south to Christchurch.

There's only so much abuse you can take, I guess, a limit to the number of times you can come home in tears of sheer frustration and anger at the hopelessness of teaching at a broken school. The time comes when you wake up one morning and realise the pain in your arse isn't down to your crap bed, and the nauseous feeling in your guts has nowt to do with the prawns you had for supper. If your occupation is making you feel physically ill, you're probably in the wrong job. Wor lass has nothing to be ashamed of, having made great strides with the kids and managing to set up a whole-school behavioural reward system in the short time she's been there. My work has been painfully slow in taking off and it's largely down to the fact it all seems so temporary here. The long and short is, Auckland's just not working for either of us and it's time to move on.

I've left a few threads hanging there... I'll come back to them later cos this is turning into one of those epics I promised I'd stop turning out. The first, most immediate thing is Niki's back. It got much, much worse than shooting pains when she came in from yoga the other night bent double, having tackled the Warrior and come off worst. She's currently getting physiotherapy, including acupuncture, and is banned from yoga for the foreseeable. The physio is taking about a herniated disk. She should really be resting, not feeling obliged to go into work, but aside from a few days off where she's just been unable to move, she's been in every day. More about that as it develops. Hasn't stopped her going out on the razz tonight, so there's definitely hope :)

The other one is the casual announcement that we're moving on, again. In order to get to our chosen destination in time for next term, we need to be out of here within 5 weeks, hopefully straight into a new home on the South Island, and even more hopefully, having found someone suitable to take on the remainder of our 12-month lease... we'd hoped that some friends might be interested but it's a lot of upheaval if you're not blessed with itchy feet and incredibly compliant kids. E &O are just awesome, shooting away under the sun of a second consecutive summer (Oscar's grown over 7cm in under five months...) and absolutely full-on up for another move. E has a big pre-birthday party planned for the week before we leave. O has no idea what's going on, really. Daft as a brush, just like his dad.

So you can see there are plenty of things to be getting on with. Besides work, we have boxes to pack, barely six weeks since we unpacked them. Actively looking for new work in the Christchurch area. We need to find tenants. And a new house.. our broadband connection is shredded... oh, almost forgot to mention: our residency has come through too! Good news for registering with doctors etc. It's all go, and out of adversity and despair, a whole new horizon, full of hope and almost unbearable excitement and anticipation, is rising out of the gloom.

We shall keep you posted. Or at least I will...

This week I have been mostly listening to: Jim White's Transnormal Skiperoo, so now we all want to live in a turquoise house :)

*I'm mentioning no names, but if you're a teacher thinking of moving here, happen to read this and would like to know the name of the school, leave a comment with your contact details. Suffice to say, be wary of agencies recruiting in the UK for NZ schools ...

it's been one hell of a trip so far...

If you had asked me, about a month before we left, how I felt about leaving our European lives behind, I'd have said, 'easy, no problem', and those that know me well might even have suggested I was being a bit blasé about it all. The reality of saying good bye began to sink in when we popped over to Spain and I had to say adios to some really good friends. Even though we'd left Spain six months previously, it was (is) still home and i had to keep reminding myself that I actually would be seeing everyone again, one day. There's nonetheless a weird permanence about saying good bye that was heart wrenching, and remains so. If I try hard (and I generally try really hard not to, I'm not that masochistic...) i can still feel that same wrench. I went through a phase for the first couple of weeks here of having "saying good bye" dreams every night, really vivid and sad. They seem to have stopped now, thankfully, although it was really nice to see some of you again :-)

Well then, down to the real nitty gritty and the reason i finally got round to writing - school. I know Ive had a couple of years off and despite a couple of months doing supply in the UK will admit to being a touch rusty. However, I'm generally confident that i'm an ok teacher, I do love it and it's all I ever really wanted (and want) to do. I've come in to this school in term 4, at the end of the year, at the end of one hell of a year for the kids I'm with and the school itself. Myself and a fab girl from Wigan called Antonia have been lifted up and dropped into a school in crisis, quite frankly.

An incident occurred in term 3 involving one of the Deputy Principals (who had been sharing my class with the other DP, who is an angel!) resigning for some reason – an argument? misunderstanding? – with the Head who recruited us. The Ministry of Education have instigated an enquiry and staff morale is in the minus numbers. And the kids are something else. Both my class and Antonia's have been messed around a lot; I am my class' 4th teacher, Antonia is the 7th for hers... in one year! My main impression after 2 weeks is that they are incredibly rude, respond more to negative attention than positive and can give it out but are unable to take it. I only have 23 kids but they are such a handful. I'm not teaching, I am trying to control behaviour but so far nothing has worked.

Usually, a couple of weeks into a job, even if you have come in late in the year or as a supply teacher you've "got" the kids and you know how to handle them. In 10 days of being with this class I've had about one hour of it being OK. I usually alternate between waiting for them to settle down, asking them nicely to be quiet and yelling like a blummin' lunatic. It isn't fun. They swear, although not (yet) directly at me, if I ask them to be quiet or to do something I get the blackest looks I have had in my entire life and am generally tutted at at least 20 times a day. Of course, I am a white Pommie female who has dared to enter a patriarchal culture in a position which in most cultures demands at least a modicum of respect, so really, what do I expect?!

Somewhat reassuring, but at the same time entirely depressing, is the fact that I'm not the only teacher there in this position. Staff who have been there for years are sworn at, have scissors thrown at them and are disrespected in other ways. I have been told that not all of the schools in the cluster mine belongs to are the same but find it hard to believe... if anyone has any ideas of strategies I can use I'd be eternally grateful! The remaining DP is wonderful, he has been at the school for about 20 years and is totally respected by everyone. He helps a lot but has a heavy load and also I really don't want (and normally wouldn't need) to be "carried". We don't know the curriculum, have to do all these tests with the kids and, and have to write reports in a couple of weeks?! I've got 9 hours of release time coming up over the next few weeks, can't wait! Aaaaagh!!! Needless to say, the CV is in circulation!

It's a shame, as nothing else I've experienced here is anywhere near as negatively-charged, but it's hard to deny it has seriously coloured my first impressions of the country we're hoping to call home one day. Work is a big part of your life and when it's crap the rest of your life is bound to be tainted by that. I mean, there are some brilliant schools here (Elly's is just one example) and whereas Howick might not be our first choice of town to live in, we've barely scratched the surface of what NZ has to offer. We both know we have a lot to offer, and it's probably just a matter of time before we get the chance to prove it.