Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

Our friend Wendy had the unfortunate pleasure of working at a completely and utterly ridiculous school. There is a lot of back story to help explain why they are ridiculous but suffice to say they rarely paid her on time, they fired Nollie, and the school looks like a part of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. The school is up in the mountains in Yangsan and has a cotton candy machine and themed rooms.

Fortunately for us though, this school decided they wanted to have an open house for the parents one Saturday afternoon and since they only had one foreign teacher, Wendy, they needed more to fill in for the day to make a better impression. Wendy immediately thought of Jacob and let her director know. Upon hearing that Wendy’s friend was Canadian they asked if he spoke French. So while Jacob doesn’t, I do, and this is how we both came to work at the school for the day.

The school hired a car to pick us up early Saturday morning to make the trip to Yangsan. Along the way we also picked up the other teacher for the day, Waseem a Pakistani cultural teacher. Waseem talked our ears off for the remaining 30 minutes to Yangsan before he headed to the kitchen to prepare for the students.

My job for the day was to teach the children and their parents French. They had prepared flash cards for the day including things like, Bonjour, Au Revoir, some foods, colours etc. Sounds easy enough, except when you factor in that these children are only about 5 and can only speak about 3 words of English. I ended up spending the whole day singing Frère Jacques and Head and Shoulders in French.

I shouldn’t complain though because Jacob really had the more challenging, read embarrassing, of the two jobs. His job was to sell little trinkets from the fake market. Mrs. Joe the crazy director insisted that he yell the entire time and wear a foolishly small hat.

The funniest part of the whole day was that because I spoke French, Mrs.Joe was convinced that I was actually from France. No matter how many times we told her that I was actually Canadian, she would just  not believe it. Which also meant that she would not and could not believe that Jacob and I were married. Despite showing her the rings and having Wendy corroborate our story, the fact that I was from France and Jacob from Canada made it impossible for us to be married.

In the end though, we got paid and it was another story for the books. It was also a lovely little reminder of how lucky I am to work at a regular school.