8. Detatched Retinas (Sic)

You may have all seen BBC News this week, and noted that there has been 'political unrest' in the Maldives. I'm not allowed to publicly comment on Maldivian politics - according to the stipulations of my contract and also about twelve e-mails, telephone and Skype reminders since Saturday. (You all know me so well.) Therefore, I can't say much here, but after doing my research - which for absolute no reason has included reading page 33 of the Maldivian Constitution - I have decided to draw a very subtle analogy. The version of events has been disputed by all parties, and personally I think it's like having a cigarette and getting smoke in my eyes, and thus experiencing tobacco up detatched retinas! It certainly feels as painful.

Can you tell that I was in a very boring meeting earlier today?

If anyone feels inclined to do some research learn more about the situation, you may read a few differing opinions from the Independent here, former President Nasheed in the New York Times here, current President Waheed's personal website here and Raajje News here. Again, I'd like to repeat that these are not my opinion pieces, I am remaining utterly impartial, and that I am in no way becoming involved with the internal partisan politics of the Maldives.

Anyway, life on the island pretty much continued, but with a few more political rallies and a few less policemen. (They weren't killed - rather summoned to help restore the peace in Male'). I'm surprised how quickly absolute normality has been restored to be honest. What recent events mean for the future of my tenure in the Maldives remain unclear, but most people seem convinced that the programme will continue without any problems.

Time is really starting to move now though. I've now been here for 7 weeks! In just 41 weeks I'll be flying home. Ridonkulous. I've also settled in to my new (and permanent) home for the year, so now have access to a private bathroom, a kitchen, and a garden. The house is big, and shared between myself, Andrew, and the landlord's son-in-law. Proper party town! Except instead of having raucous parties we mainly steam vegetables and occasionally fry chips.

I'll leave this short - for a change - and write a full update in a few days. If your eyes are not yet tired, please enjoy this wonderful video of my new home.

Gotcha!

7. This is mainly about sand and fish

February started, as February tends to, on the 1^st of February. It also started with a tough day at school, and a v.v.v.important meeting at 8.45pm. Or this would be the assumption, from the notice that was shoved under the nose of every staff member that day. “Staff meeting, 8.45pm. Attendance compulsory”. We had to sign a sheet to prove we had seen and understood the message. The same sheet is passed back to us at the meeting itself, to be countersigned, proving our attendance. There’s lots of signing things in Ihavandhoo, so we can’t really claim to have been out of the loop.

So what would this meeting be about? As I changed into my smart clothes that evening, I was somewhat mystified. Maybe restructuring the school day – moving from double-session to single-session, as Dhidhoo is (seamlessly) planning. Maybe another debate about the merits and demerits of placing a price cap on private tuition – many of the teachers supplement their income by providing extra classes to those willing to pay – but this is a market where demand far outstrips supply, and prices are starting to move beyond the means of poorer families. We spent two hours in a staff meeting about that last week, but no conclusion had been reached, to the chagrin of the management. Were we revisiting that old chestnut?

When the meeting started with a twenty-minute speech in Dhivehi, I was guessing it could be important. The Dep-Principal is a respected man in these parts, and everyone was listening intently. Then the Principal offered to translate his speech into English, and there was lots of very admirable sentiments – developing community cohesion, promoting our virtuous profession, teachers as the masons of the nation. (I think in sense of carving the stone (bashing the children) into useful shapes, rather than being a secret cabal who control the army, government, and economy to suit our own shady objectives. If that teaching club exists I haven’t been invited yet. Maybe it’s the PTA).   The context, however, was somewhat underwhelming: the school was getting some mounds of sand delivered to recover the schoolyard, and could everyone lend a few hours on Friday morning to help out.

That was the only item on the agenda, so with an enlightened mind, I emerged from the meeting to cultivate my pretentious new theory about the transmission of information / notifications in the Maldives. I’ve decided that if some serious research is needed, or an important presentation must be prepared, you are normally given an hour’s notice to start and complete it. When there is something that would normally require a month’s notice, such as a transfer to a different island – you have one hour. If a 2-minute announcement needs to be made, there is also one hour set aside to convey it. See the pattern here?

As it was, the Sandday was a massive community event. Easily half the island must have turned up, and with a thousand workers a big job happens rather quickly. There was no general organisation or direction, but the chaos and raw effort got the job done. Groups of people set up their own chain gangs, with basic ‘specialisation of labour’ and ‘Fordist production lines’, and between 6am and 10am the whole yard was covered with 10 cm of pure white sand earlier dredged from the harbour. Adam Smith would have been proud. Men grabbed shovels and piled it into wheelbarrows. Young boys carried huge sacks filled with sand to prove their strength, whilst the women set up chains and moved a massive quantity of the stuff, whilst also chattering wildly. The older boys commandeered massive carts and turned the whole day into a festival - a dozen or more would run the cart from the stockpile to the school, with whoops and cheers and chants. Older islanders raked the yard smooth, or provided water bottles, Wagon Wheels and raw eggs to the labourers. Everyone dripped with sweat. The PA system bellowed traditional bodu-beru music over the whole island – this is loud and rhythmic drumming, and perfect for working to, and it just topped off a great atmosphere. I tried my hand at carrying sacks, shovelling sand, running with the cart, and did most of it with a big smile plastered on my face, because it’s really the first day I’ve properly felt part of this fantastic community. The schoolyard now looks great, so I don't really begrudge losing a morning!

Nor that afternoon, which was the first staff trip of the year. The Events Committee arranged to hire a boat, and so at 2pm seventeen teachers sailed off into the gorgeous blue ocean aboard a medium-sized fishing dhoni. Never to return. Like the plot to some rubbish Goosebumps story. Or it began to feel like that, when we were still bobbing through the night seven hours later, and I was starting to feel the effects of seasickness, at odds with my carefully-crafted image of a brave sailor with an iron constitution. Now the world knows different – although I did resist the urge to chunder.

For the first five hours it was a fascinating experience, learning how most of the islanders make their living. Firstly we searched for shoals of little baitfish. Several people had to jump into the ocean, and drag out net and floats to create a wall about five metres from the boat. On the other side, a few of the guys seemed to shepherd the shoal towards the wall, and then the men on the boat pulled the bottom of the net upwards as quick as possible, creating a bag which was squeezed from all directions until thousands of tiny wriggling fish could be scooped up into the hold. You can see that by clicking here, and I apologise if your eyes are scarred by exposure to "those blue briefs".

Then the real fishing started. The grizzled captain is clearly a devotee of the Brothers Grimm, because his strategy was straight from the Hansel and Gretel playbook. One junior fisherman – actually a student in my Grade 11 class – would casually throw a handful of captive baitfish overboard every ten seconds, creating a “trail of breadcrumbs” to attract our dinner. (I think this is how fish fingers are made). Meanwhile, from the back and sides of the boat, we all trailed lines with the unluckier baitfish, which were somewhat cruelly skewered whilst they were still alive. If anything is a disposable commodity in the Maldives, it’s baitfish. Some of the men focused on hooking seabirds to bring home as pets (or food – this was never quite clear), but the majority were after the sizeable and tasty reef fish.

Sadly it was a bad day for fishing – as dusk started to fall the whole party had only managed about fifteen between them. But I was informed by an optimistic Agil that the real fun happened at night, when the metre-long tuna fish are feeding. Some of the smaller catches were butchered into chunks, and this time we waited the lines and dropped much bigger hooks into much deeper water. After an hour, there was nada, zilch, nothing. Then I stepped up, dropped a line, and pulled in the catch of the day. A six-foot 20-stone monster, pulled from the deepest reaches of the ocean, caught with sheer wit, raw muscle and garden twine. There is some slight exaggeration here, but the fact is, I caught a (very small) reef fish. Now I have to experience zero-gravity and my bucket-list is complete.

 The edge was almost taken off the fun when, at 8pm, I started feeling my first ever bout of seasickness, and tried to subtly enquire how much longer we were staying out on the water. “Probably not all night” was the unsympathetic response. With my stomach curdling and my head dizzy from all the rocking, I had to go lie down to contemplate another eight hours at sea. Fortunately they were pulling my leg, in a surprisingly adept way, and massively enjoyed my clear relief when we started heading for home a few minutes later. It totally lifted the psychological pressure, and I felt almost myself again. On the journey home I sat with some of the younger teaching staff, and shared a highbrow discussion on the merits of Proust and Nabokov. Or rather, they wanted a full explanation of the verb “to moon someone”, and then became gleeful / dumbfounded / appalled when I tentatively acknowledged that British schools do indeed teach sex education, or as my highly-professional peers called it, ‘sexology’.

After 7 hours at sea I left the boat with just that one rather unfortunate reef fish to my credit. Slightly sad I couldn’t take it with me, because that’s really one of my minor goals for this year – a determination to become an expert at cooking fish. So I can host suburban middle-class dinner parties in the parties and pretentiously boast about my formative year in the Maldives and how it forms the exotic base of my gastronomic repertoire. But also so I can eat great food whilst I’m here. In Dhiffushi (see Blog #2) our host had provided sweet and sticky chilli tuna steaks, which were just incredible. They tasted like spare ribs, but far healthier and tastier, and I decided that I would perfect the recipe. By trial and error. So far I’ve used combinations of chilli, garlic, oil, sugar, lime, lemon, and salt. I have failed several times and left Merlin with some very burnt pans to scrub, but last night it worked quite well, so at last I reach base camp! When I get my wages some will probably be invested in soy sauce and honey (and honey loops) to see if that provides any impetus to perfect fish steak.

A more basic achievement is learning the skill of butchering and preparing the fish for cooking. I would say fishmongering, but I’m not sure this is even the word, nor that it is acceptable after the Ricky Gervais debacle. I’d already mentioned that I wanted to learn, so yesterday Merlin and I spontaneously bought some small tuna from a wandering fish salesman – this is how it sounds, just a hygienic wheelbarrow of dead fish and blood in the midday sun – and got ourselves three fine specimens for about £2. Merlin then showed me the process: 1) chop off fins; 2) descale; 3) chop off head; 4) pull out guts; 5) chop off tail; 6) chop off dorsals; 7) chop into pieces. Lots of chopping and pulling. We then took different routes at stage 8 – he dissected the nice meaty eyeballs and other edible remainders, whilst I performed a hilarious double-act routine with an anthropomorphised squeaky-voiced fish head. To great acclaim, and a possible Academy Award.

6. Snapshots