Celebrate Good Times, Cmon.

Celebrate good times.

What a pessimist I was in my last entry! STrike is over!

The remaining 4 people on the board resigned on stage at our meeting this evening. School's on like Donkey Kong!

"Union's on strike, He's Down on his luck, its tough"

Wow my life is interesting now! I don’t even have to make my own drama.

We are now in day 2 of the strike. Yesterday afternoon at our faculty meeting we learned that two more Board of Trustee members (the bad guys) resigned, leaving only 5 of the original 10. They now don’t have quorum and are impotent (ha ha), BUT the remaining board members are digging in and putting up sand bags.

We then needed to vote whether or not to continue the strike. Fortunately, the entire team of principals walked in and announced that they were also now on strike as well. They then all dropped pants and showed that they spelled the words “K-I-S-S O-U-R” on their asses, and directed this towards the remaining board members.

Teachers of course voted to extend strike alongside the principals. Board members had till 8 pm last night to resign. They did not, because they are subscribers to the douche-bag-philosophy. Thus, I had to call 10 of my students and tell them there would not be school today. NOT fun. One board member, in a burst of professionalism, texted the teacher community with the message, “As parents, we think you should all be fired.” We are currently looking for a service that delivers flaming bags of poo to his doorstep. No luck yet.

Today one more Board member resigned (the guy mentioned above). I spent a few hours calling parents trying to get the 800 votes we need to oust the remained 4 board members. I will honestly tell you that if I had to be a telemarketer to put bread on the table, I would starve. Wow did that suck. It’s not easy explaining the situation over a fuzzy connection to a mom who speaks mainly Japanese. But, I think I added a few votes for the good guys. We only need about 150 more.

And so....we meet again in a few hours, but I am not optimistic that the remaining board will resign, nor that we will get enough votes soon enough to have school on Friday. The bullshit will likely last the rest of the week.

Again, check out www.ismstakeholders.com if you are really bored.

We're Strikingl, Bitches!

Warning!!!! Like anything I write, this is NOT to be taken as 100% factual.

Sorry to be only updating you all on the past, namely the Indonesian adventure. Let me fast forward to the present, because it’s become immensely dramatic.

Jen and I (and the rest of the faculty and staff and International School of Manila) are on strike. Here’s the quick and highly biased highlights.*

The Board of Trustees has pulled a lot of douche bag moves. They got themselves elected last year in a questionable and dodgy process of absentee balloting. They’ve been micromanaging the school ever since. The principals of elementary, middle, and high school sent a public letter to the board that could be summarized as follows: “You’re a bunch of douche bags; we refuse to work with you.” The board thought about this, and then sacked the superintendent. They escorted him out of the building, past students, surrounded by armed security. **

Most of us faculty and staff were hired to our nice jobs by the super and principals, so we asked the Board to show up at a “What-the-Fuck-is-Going-On Meeting.” The board did not show up.

So we did not show up at school today. Fortunately, several hundred parents did show up to sign petitions calling for resignation of the board. Hopefully strike will end soon when resignations occur. So far, 3 of the 10 Board members have resigned.


* these highlights are not meant to be entirely taken as fact, but close enough for those of you who will never have any dealings with international education

** Almost all security is armed at international schools, this is not abnormal.

Across the Heart of Darkness

So if you read the blog last, we finished a long, shaky (and yet awesome) boat trip past Komodo Island and some of Eastern Indonesia. We were on the western side of the large island of Flores (100 miles) across. Our flight left for Manila in a few days, but we flew out on the Eastern side of the island. How hard can it be to travel 100 miles? How hard could it be to build a canal across Panama? The answer to both these timeless questions turned out to be the same: “Pretty damn hard.”

pictures that don't really prove it

We sat in the less-then-desirable-town of Labuan Baju reading our Lonely Planet about how terrible the roads and busses were on this island. A bus actually pulled up right next to where we were eating. Great! A young lad, clinging to the outside, promptly leaned over and vomited. Not so great. Bus = not an option.

4 of us decided to hire a driver and an SUV type vehicle to drive us across over a few days. So 3 Americans, one Swiss, one crazy-ass driver set off through the wilderness armed with several karaoke tapes, Carlos Santana, and the Backstreet Boys. Things were bound to be awesome.

Windy roads would be an understatement. The back seat was considered blissful, because at least you didn’t have to watch certain death awaiting you around the next blind curve. Our driver Matt, assured us this was normal. Not overly encouraging, but at least he had lived this long.

He took us to a rural home of a woman distilling Arak: fermented coconut milk, distilled so as to become jet fuel. Whilst the process of this was fascinating, I would rather drink tequila w/ tomato juice, and that’s saying a lot.

We stopped for two nights in the town of Mony (yes, just like the song, “Mony, Mony”). We stayed with Matt’s brother, Bryan. We got to experience some kick ass things like a natural hot springs in a rice paddy and these 3 crazy volcanic crater lakes (the chameleon lakes, all different colors). What was especially bizarre was that when we returned for the 2nd night, a drum set and guitars all appeared, so we rocked out. I played the drum set with actual sticks ripped off a tree. It was classic. I also tried to drink Arak. Ugly stuff. The best part about our lodging was they had a dumbbell set like Marky-Mark used in the video “Good Vibrations”

We somehow made it alive across Flores in time for our flight. Granted, no one knew if it would actually take off or not, nor when. We just hung out at the airport all day. They had a metal detector, but it wasn’t plugged in. Eventually a plane showed up, and some nice man decided to let us get on.

We flew to our new home in Manila.