Basketball at Midnight

Now: Here I am on Langkawi, an Archipelago on the Northwest side of Malaysia. It’s nice, and there’s no taxes, so it can be cheap, but it’s just a day’s rest before I go to Penang and then Sumatra. It might have been smarter to just go to Penang to begin with, but I make no claims to being smart. It’s a nice little place, and Carlsburg beer, which usually costs 6-8 Ringgit in the store, here costs 1.70. That’s pleasant. Too bad I don’t really know anybody and don’t feel like drinking

Failures

For this post, I’ll catch you up on some things in the last few weeks that kept going wrong. I started to write a bit about this in the previous post, but it was just getting too long and too melodramatic. I believe I said something like “My life has become a string of catastrophic failures.”

It’s not nearly that bad, of course, but it does feel like there have been a remarkable number of “bad” things happen since Earth Camp. The Camps, if I end up having anything interesting to comment on, will still have to be saved for another post.

Anyway, let me see what I can conjure up. There were a few big bad wolves of the past:

1. Vague sicknesses: possibly brought on by the increasing rains in Terengganu, I’ve been on-and-off sick for the past couple weeks, and it culminated on the my last week at the school.  That made it difficult to get out and get all of the supplies I needed for my closing camp program. It went back and forth between stuffy-head, stuffy-nose, cough (which I still have now), to something much more like a persistent acute headache and fogginess of thought. That was the bad stuff. I drank a quart of fruit juice a day and that might have helped a little bit.

2. On my last supply run of, well, forever, and about 1 hour before my final closing ceremony with all my campers (who are roughly the most important 50 students in my life), and with about 5 km left to go until I reached the school, I hit a downpour: a huge, massive, downpour that came without the warning of lightning (usually I can see the lightning for about 10 minutes before I hit the storm). So I stopped at a little covered place and put a bag around my computer, as usual, and continued.

I got to school, stopped at the room, and brought everything in as quickly as I could. I took my computer out and realized that the backpack had actually collected a pool of water at the bottom which the computer had been sitting in (I drape the plastic bag over the top of the computer, so the bottom is open).

The computer didn’t work, and I couldn’t play the slideshow, or set up a place for the students to exchange pictures from Earth and Space camp, or project the words to the closing song we were going to sing. The rain also destroyed the posterboard for the final activity, but we got around that problem and made a substitute.  With only, at this point, 30 minutes before the meeting time, I couldn’t put together a good substitute, and so the kids and I just wandered around and played some music from one kid’s handphone and made the poster and sang a few songs.  It was a little stretched for the time I had reserved, but still fun (and the biggest problem was not being able to exchanged photos, since they all brought their thumb drives).

Since then, happily, my computer has been slowly limping back to life. After a day, I could tell the hard drive was doing something, and I connected it to a monitor and it would start to boot up and shut off.  After a couple more days, it would boot up completely and I could access all my files (and saved the important ones), and weird sounds came out of the speakers. The night I arrived in KL, the screen came on, but was faded and hard to read, and the computer booted all the way up. Now, it has a bunch of water marks on it, but seems to be alive and I’ve read the water marks on the screen will recede.

The computer not working, however, led to the next problem, though, since I had been typing out all of the goodbye letters to my students.  Now that they were lost to the water god, I frantically tried to write some of them out in the middle of packing on my last night. This was a reasonably poor remedy, and I didn’t get that many done, and got even less sleep, and felt particularly bad that I had letters for some important students but not for others.

2.b It also seemed that my camera got wet and wasn’t working, but it’s quite the trooper and has recovered both from the water balloon attack during capture the flag and from the rainstorm.

3. Visa to Pakistan and ETA closure. You’ll notice on my travel itinerary that I’m no longer planning to go to Pakistan. I spent many hours when I was in KL trying to find the Pakistani Embassy and talk to someone about getting a visa. I finally had it down, and the plan was to go at 4:30pm for the afternoon session and get back to the hotel at 6:00 to see the ETA’s off. Plenty of time, in theory. However, they didn’t actually open for the afternoon until 5:30, and waited to handle all Malaysian Passport holders because they could tell me that they cannot give me a visa because I am not a legal resident of Malaysia (being on, technically, a tourist visa). So then I rushed off to get back to the hotel, thinking that they wouldn’t actually leave on time, they did, though, and I missed saying goodbye to the ETAs that were flying out that day.

So those were the biggest events that went wrong right at the end that I felt a need to complain about. Nothing actually catastrophic, you see, but rather annoying.