Elephants in the jungle

I had a slightly surreal moment this week, when a teacher invited me to break the fast at her home. Her husband works at the school as well, and when I said "I'd love to, but are you sure you have the time to cook with such short notice?" she looked at him and laughed. "She has lots of time in the afternoon," he said. "But when the sun goes down, and there's no electricity, and nothing else to do, that's when she's busy!" "Nothing to do but make more babies!" Su screamed with laughter. The surreality came from her appearance: a floor-length baju kurung (the Malaysian national dress - a long blouse over a skirt) and her hair scraped back under a tight headscarf, she's the Good Muslim Wife epitomised, and yet here she was making jokes about sex in a room full of male colleagues! Then she leaned over to me, patted my knee, and said "Well, Emily isn't married yet, so she has no idea what we're talking about..." and I had to smile and blush and mumble that yes indeed, I had no idea what she was talking about...

The berbuka puasa was, as usual, gluttonous - Su is an excellent cook. All the teachers were there and I got handed several beautiful, fat babies to coo over and practise English with (turns out the Malaysian for "Woodiwoodiwoo!" is "Woodiwoodiwoo!") Su's daughter Ca (you say it Cha) was also present, but extremely shy, and it took a lot to get her looking at me. She brought out her Maths book to practise sums with her mother - Su thought she was pretty poor at Maths, but I felt that getting a 5-year-old to answer 7+8= correctly was pretty impressive...

The next day, I was reading in my room, when a scratching came at the door. I looked up nervously: the day before I'd had to chase a rat out of the kitchen. The scratching came again. Then a corner of the black plastic that's taped to the bottom of the door to keep out scorpions was lifted, and I figured a rat probably wasn't smart enough to evolve fingers, so I opened the door. A nervous face gazed up at me from the floor where she was still clutching the plastic: Ca had come to visit. I sat outside with her on the verandah armed with paper and coloured pencils, and we drew trees and cats, girls and boys, suns and butterflies, and she named each one in careful, round script, a different colour for each letter. I couldn't believe how fast she picked up and remembered each word. To test her, we went for a walk through the campus. I marched ahead and she marched behind. Every now again I'd stop, and every time she would bump into me. I'd point at a tree and say "What's that?" and she'd shout "Tree!" and then we'd carry on. At some point we were joined by a gaggle of giggling girls, and a friendly but slightly slow boy from Year 6, and they all giggled and shouted their way through everything I could possibly point at. I pointed at the jungle and said "Elephant!" And they all shouted it back at me. I looked confused, and said "Elephant?", making a trunk with my arm and pointing into the jungle. They all fell about laughing and denying that elephants lived in their jungle.

The next day, a little girl saw me in the school. She came running up, her arm hanging from her nose, shouting "Elephant! Elephant!" 

My job here is done.