22nd March
"You should be teaching the f---ing class, Andrew," my Chemistry teacher told
me when I was seventeen. "You'd do a better f---ing job at it than I do."On that distant Friday night in the Scottish Highlands - a place where the
nightlife is so limited that teachers are forced to go and get drunk in the
same places as their students - I never imagined that I would get the chance
to prove whether or not he was right. Much as I love colours and smells and
explosions, a career of helping bored students get to grips with a subject
that most of them loathe wasn't what I'd dreamed of. However, after Mr Noel's retirement, Ranwadi needed somebody to teach its
senior Chemistry classes. Since I was the only person around with a science
degree (albeit in a different science) - and the only science teacher who
didn't blankly refuse to touch the subject - I was given the job. Ranwadi's senior science lab was built less than two years ago with Australian
aid money, yet already looks dingy and old-fashioned. A hibiscus hedge along
one side of the building blocks out light and harbours mosquitoes, and on the
other side an overhanging roof obscures what would otherwise be a beautiful
view of the vine-draped ridge across the valley from the school. Along the
wooden panels where the walls meet the roof are rows of government posters
carrying important messages in Vanuatu's three national languages ("Don't
litter in our beautiful Pacific. Respektem korel rif blong Vanuatu. Sauvons
nous tortues de l'extinction"). Elsewhere the walls are made of plain, painted
blocks and resist attempts to decorate them: you can't put pins into solid
cement, and sellotape and blu-tack quickly lose their stickiness in tropical
conditions. On blustery days, draughts through the windows make any experiment involving
flames nearly impossible. Experiments requiring mains electricity have to be
done in the evenings, since there is usually no power during the day, which is
awkward since all the lights in the lab are broken. The shed housing the
school's electricity generator is right next door to the lab, and on the rare
occasions when somebody does decide to switch on the power during the day it
fills the room with noise. At the start of term several of the water taps in the sinks along the sides of
the room weren't working. The water supply mysteriously restarted one
lunchtime when nobody was around, and a tap that had inadvertently been left
on flooded the room. Next door to the lab is a gloomy store room full of glassware and chemicals.
By Vanuatu standards Ranwadi's science department is actually very well
equipped, partly due to Mr Noel's efforts in bringing science materials from
New Zealand and partly thanks to a recent shipment of supplies from AusAID.
However, the overworked Mr Noel seldom had time to clean and tidy the
storeroom, and nobody else ever bothered. Many pieces of equipment were buried
in dusty, unlabelled boxes (some of them, I suspected, had been left
unlabelled on purpose to discourage theft), and dirty bottles and test tubes
left over from long-past experiments mouldered on the benches. Most of the old
glassware was covered with a grey film of dirt, and cobwebs clung to the
ceiling. One large spider, in a remarkable feat of engineering, had managed to
construct a web that spanned the entire room. Any chemical with a tendency to degrade in warm conditions had long since done
so, and those with the ability to absorb water from the air had turned to
slush in the humidity. The salt in the tub marked 'sodium chloride' looked as
if it had been scraped from a winter road. Worst of all, there were several
bottles and flasks of liquid that had no label, or that looked and smelled as
if they weren't what the label claimed them to be. What was I supposed to do
with these mystery chemicals? Were they corrosive? Flammable? Poisonous? I had
no idea. I was reluctant to simply leave them lying around the lab, but nor
did I want to pour them down the sink, from which they would probably drain
straight into the local stream. In the end I put them all in a tray marked
"Unknown chemicals" with a note to the students and the other science
teachers: "If you made these or you know what they are, please label them or
dispose of them." I knew that nobody would touch them. My new Year 12 Chemistry class, who had already studied the subject for a
year, were beginning a topic on Organic Chemistry. "Living things are made of carbon compounds," I told them, and proved the
point by plucking a flower from the bushes outside and dropping it into neat
sulphuric acid; the flower disintegrated into a black carbon sludge. The
students were impressed, especially when I told them that the same thing would
probably happen to my finger if I dipped it into the acid. The Year 11s were just beginning their course, and were tackling the
boring-but-necessary topic that forms the first chapter of every chemistry
book: the structure of atoms. "You can knock electrons off their atoms," I explained, rubbing a balloon
against my shirt. I held the balloon up to my hair, expecting a tickling of
static electricity. Nothing happened. The electricity had been sapped away by
the humidity in the air. I would have to try the demonstration again in the
dry season. After a few weeks, a new science teacher arrived at Ranwadi, and Year 11
Chemistry was taken off my hands. Instead - and in spite of making it as
obvious as I could that I wanted nothing to do with Year 13s this year - I was
given a Year 13 Chemistry class to supervise. My class turned out to consist
of one student. Most Ni-Vanuatu youngsters go through a phase of being exceptionally shy. They
are particularly shy around white people, teachers, and members of the
opposite sex. A white male teacher giving one-on-one tuition to a local girl
was therefore going to be an awkward situation. Fortunately, the girl turned
out to be a keen student (perhaps she had picked up on the fact that I would
gladly drop the class given a good excuse), and the first few lessons went
surprisingly well. The Year 13 courses are organised by the University of the South Pacific
headquarters in Fiji, and comprise a fixed weekly programme of practical
activities, individual study, and periodic assessments which are sent to Fiji
for marking. The courses make virtually no allowance for the fact that the
science facilities at many schools in the South Pacific are basic, nor for the
fact that most students in the region do not speak English as a first
language. As in last term's Year 13 classes, much of my time was spent
explaining in simple terms what the dense, university-style language in the
course materials was trying to convey. Matters weren't helped by the fact that the Year 13s at Ranwadi, in typical
Pentecost style, were five weeks late in starting their courses. "It says here that we should have a big exam next week," my Chemistry student
pointed out to me during her second tutorial. "But I haven't had a chance to
study any of the material for it yet." (She didn't say this in quite so many
words, but through whispered half-sentences and by pointing at her Course
Guide she managed to communicate what she meant.) "Can the exam be postponed?" I asked the teacher responsible for organising
the Year 13 courses. I didn't get a straight answer. I secretly hoped that there would another military coup in Fiji. Nothing
nasty, of course, just something that would disrupt the University of the
South Pacific enough to set back the Year 13s' assessments by a few weeks and
give the poor students a chance to catch up.
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