Famagusta, teaching and the fall of (a) man

Hi All,

We have been quite busy for in the past two weeks and our dreams of slowing down in Cyprus are placed on the backburner. At least, we should be able to pursue it again with more vigour from next week onwards. Jeanne-Marie has just completed a job for a ompany in SA. It was quite stressful because the brief she received was terribly scant, and she had to improvise a lot in the process. What makes it even more stressful is that she/we hope to receive more work from this company and Jeanne-Marie is not quite sure if she has done the work correctly. My experience of her work tells me that she probably did the work better than was expected.

Hopefully next week we will have Internet at home, so start reading up on Skype. Communication will then be much easier and I hope to put more posts on the blog then. Last Sunday we went to Famagusta on the east coast. It is about 100km from where we live. The Salamis ruins are just a few kilometers north of the town. These ruins are aparrently more than 3000 years old. When we got there it was terribly windy and we decided not to get out. The Cypriots, however do not seem to mind the whether, because they were there in vast numbers doing their version of a braai. It smelled great. A braai here seems to be more like a "cook-out" They have tables with all kinds of veggies on, they prepare their frikadelle on site and they sit on chairs and not on picnic blankets. Having travelled all the way, we decided to explore the town. We stumbeled, literally (i'll tell you later) into the old town. There we found a gothic cathedral that was built in something like 1233 by the crusaders. It is beautiful on the outside. It has a lot of scars from centuries of invasions and strife but is still reasonably inntact. On the inside it is rather pale, because it is now a mosque. The Muslims do no share the Catholics and Orthox tradition's enthusiasm for interior decorating. Further on from the cathedralthere are many churches, most of them locked up and having been used for other purposes through the centuries. One such church is the Church of St Peter and St Paule rest of the old town square is in ruins, but it seems that they are looking after it. In the square in front of the cathedral is a fig tree from Africa that is apparently over 700 years old.

I walked into the square with Danny on my shoulders and, like a seasoned tourist, with my camera in my hand, lense erect and ready to record my experiences. Cobble stones are beautiful, but the paving specialists of 700 years ago did not necessarily have commfortable and safe walking in mind when they laid their stones. My ankle gave way and Danny and I went crashing down. I threw him forward to avoid falling on him and a shoe cleaner caught him. In turn Danny caught the camera. Jeanne-Marie said it was a spectacularscene. Unfortunately Danny only got the camera on the first bounce. Result: Lense is bent and Camera does not work anymore. For a while we will not be able to take pictures. What a pity! We have seen amazing things since then. More about those later.

Settling into life in a new country is difficult at times. Having two children constantly on your shoulders does not make it easier. They seem to be enjoying it. I enjoy it too, but it would have been nice to just have a small break every now and then so that Jeanne-Marie and I could sit back, have abeer and enjoy the scenery. We had a brief moment like that in the square in Famagusta. Things will get better when we meet more people.

Work is not great. The university does not really go to a lot of trouble to make one feel at home. I have not yet received a full salary because I'm only paid for 18 days in Feb. I have to pay quite a lot of money for various things such as work permits and medicals associated with it. We hope that things will settle by 15 April when I will finally receive my first full salary for March. In he mean time my credit card is patient. Teaching is challenging because the students' English is of questionable quality, especially the first years. I teach them philosophy, so you can imagine that it is not easy to first explain philosophical terms to them, and second to make them understand the complexities of these terms as they feature in philosophical arguments. I learn a little Turkish in the process and found out that the words for being and becoming are the same in Turkish. Now this can have major implications for understnding ontology and other philosopical ideas. Fortunately I have a little experience with teaching people with limited English language skills in Mamelodi.

Another innteresting aspect of teaching psychology here is that the Christian referenes in Western culture related to ideas, are not readily available to the Turkish Cypriot youth. They seem to come from Muslim backgrounds although they are not expresly religious. Still some common cultural ground needs to be manifactured so that examples and theories can be made meaningful. The trick is to learn about what is different and what is similar in our collective experiences as humans. I also teach introductory Sociology. One theme thatt we deal with is Sex and Gender. I was shocked the other day at the callous way that the young men in class view women. It was hard to convince them that there is something fundamentally wrong in a society where women are paid less for the same work and furthermore that prostitution to supplement income is not a viable option. On top of my shock at these crude attitudes, i was shocked with the silence and passsivity of the women in the class. This is a small island with a small island mentality. Add to that tht the people here have been isolated in the world for the past 33 years and one finds limited views on current issues. (E.g. There are few books available in libraries and in bookstores. If it wasn't for the Intenet, teaching woulld have been nigh impossible.) In many ways my experience of South African society is that it is more sophisticated than here. Just in case you were wondering, I also teach psychology - The psychology of work, social psychology and environmental psychology, the latter which means that the environs have gone mental.

It is still quite cold here and sometimes it feels that Spring will never come. Some days are like Cape-Town four-seasons-in-a-day-days and others hint at becoming warmer. I was hoping it would get warmer sooner. Can't wait to swim.

Next time, soon, I'll write about Buffovento, crossing the border and snow on the mountains.

Cheers