Mrs. Who?!

My previous work experience includes several jobs that put me in close contact with many young children, so I had some relevant experience upon arrival at the center. Yesterday I confirmed a long held suspicion that kids will be kids, and they love nothing more than to imagine the soap opera lives of the adults who work with them.

I was standing in the computer room watching the children use the computers. One of my tasks is to help develop an IT curriculum for the center, so that children learn relevant skills that will help them get jobs. This is a hard problem to begin with, and it's made more difficult by the fact that the center only has 5 computers, and at any given time there are probably 15 or 20 students trying to use them all at once. So the curriculum needs to address the fact that even though not all of the kids can use computers at the same time, they all have to learn the material. Hence my time spent yesterday, watching the kids and trying to figure out how they split up the computer time.

There were 2 extra places to sit: a stack of plastic chairs, and a desk chair on castors. B. was sitting on the plastic chairs (it's his class) and I was standing, unsure of the protocol of taking a seat in a class that wasn't mine. B. invited me to sit, so I sat down in the desk chair for a few minutes until I was called away to do something else.

Upon my return, 3 or 4 young girls were clustered around the desk chair, saying that it belonged to B. There was a lot of smiling and giggling going on. I was immediately suspicious, the way I think most people are when they see a group of girls with a secret, but I also wasn't sitting in the chair. I told them that it was just fine, I'd stand, B. could keep his chair, and life would be good. This didn't seem to be the correct response, as they kept on telling me about this chair (and they called me "pimple face" in Sinhala...I don't know where that came from). So the chair. The legendary, mystical chair. The talking wouldn't stop. And gradually I realized that they weren't saying it was B.'s chair, but Mrs. B.'s chair, and the implication was that I was Mrs. B. I had a near heart attack imagining the ramifications of having those sorts of rumors flying around the office. Here I am, trying so hard to resprect cultural mores and the end result is that I'm the latest gossip, and probably in trouble.

I spent a good hour inwardly terrified of the consequences until I noticed that none of the other staff seemed to care. To them, it was a funny joke. I took a moment to think back to my days as a gymnastics coach, and things started to fall into place. Kids in the States do this all the time. They enjoy nothing more than to make up love affairs and tease the staff about them. It seems that kids here do the same. I was just so nervous about making a mistake that I didn't notice.

The other really interesting part of yesterday was the arrival of David and Trish, an older Australian couple who have spent their lives working with NGOs all over the world to manage rebuilding projects. They were in Africa during a coup, in India, 62 other countries that didn't get enumerated. It seems they want to help the center, which is great. They're here indefinitely.

I really envy David and Trish their travel experience. They seem completely at home with culture shock. They're a lot less uptight than I am. They've also been to Sri Lanka before, so that certainly helps.