Maria: my own employer CFBT had told us told us in Brisbane that Mari would get a job of with them when she arrived in Brunei. They then changed their mind when she got to Brunei. M then was offered a job with a local private school, al falaah, teaching English in primary .
Two months later CFBT took over this school, reemployed her on a casual basis and at one third the salary she would have been getting with a proper contract at CfBT.
The reality is that she did not get these positions because she was not an anglo Celtic 'native speaker of English' . The Ministry of Education in Brunei would not accept CFBt teachers who were not native speakers of English. If she had been of Anglo celtic saxon origin she would have been snapped up by both schools, ISB and the Jerudong international school, either as a Spanish teacher or a primary teacher .
This is a fact that no one can deny no matter how much it is dressed up in other language.
Friday, July 27, 2001
sometime, it seemed to me that the more seriously you take your job the more dangers there are to survival in Brunei.
This is very sad. I once spent three to four hours of my free time in school over the past two days trying to get my class to watch a video. I was thwarted at every turn by incompetent technicians and administrators The administrators didn't want the video machine to be used because they didn't think it was 'real teaching'. Real teaching for them is doing grammar exercises or calculations. I finally managed it but not without nearly losing my temper and damaging my professional relationships with local colleagues.
Friday, August 17, 2001
.
We had a successful trip to Labuan for a week and my son's girlfriend came with us for two days. She seemed a nice girl and we were very pleased that she had met Roger her who would have been very lonely otherwise in this first year in Brunei . I can't help thinking how different his adolescence has been from mine. Certainly I think it has been a a great improvement on mine! My Mum and Dad were never able to enjoy the pleasure of seeing their son's girlfriend at such close quarters.
In fact I never saw them either, because I never had any girlfriends in my adolescence
Sunday, September 02, 2001
One day we got some very bad news about ten days ago . CfBT phoned this at 6 p.m. on Saturday night to tell Maria that she should not go to work on Monday because the school, like cfbt, had decided only to employ native speakers.
I was livid. She was only given 24 hours notice –and only a phone call! She should have been invited in to meet with some CfBT officers. Her line managers did not say a word to Maria either before or after this shocking news. I wrote several letters to CfBt about it..
We were, by this time accustomed to the the ignorance underpinning this policy of the Ministry of the Ministry of Education'.
Thursday, July 05, 2001
Here it is then : the distillation of a career. These were my thoughts when still at Menglait, before I moved to Maktab Sains....
As a family I've had to stay on the international circuit in order to provide bread and butter for myself and my family. As a positive bi product of this, we have been able get to know and enjoy many cultures
What it has come down to in my case is that in each project, and for each project read "country" that I've been, there has often been a 'crunch' point
At this crunch point, sometimes, I have been prepared to sell my principles more than other
times in order to survive and hence provide bread and butter for myself
or my family. But I would like to think that I have not ever sold my
self to the extent that I became a complete cynic. This cynicism, I often observed in the
expatriates around me. Financially, we were therefore never as well-off as many of our contemporaries.
The basic equation never seems to change. In Ghana, in my first job, I
was ready to resign after six weeks when I realized I was contributing
to the rural depopulation of the village of Wa! I hung on because i was single and enjoying myself
Thirty years later, in Brunei I was always close to resigning many because I couldn't tolerate the dysfunctionality of the system. But I survived for 9 years.
What happened in between?
If I look at each place I've been in, there are some similarities.
At
King's Hospital School in Dublin I was dissatisfied with the Principal
and his corrupt little regime of staff bullies. They didn't like me, anyway. I was single
At Methodist college in Belfast I was dissatisfied because I was not fulfilling my ambition to explore other cultures.I was single.
In Malawi, I was dissatisfied with the rigid system of the nuns. I was single
In Colombia I was dissatisfied with corruption. I was fired without cause
In Mexico I was dissatisfied with nepotism.
In Dubai I was dissatisfied with corruption. They didn't like me.
In Melbourne Australia I was dissatisfied with corruption. I survived longer than all other senior administrators in the school's history.
In Brisbane, I lasted for 6 years, but, I was about to lose my job
In all cases, I resigned. It was just a question of how long I lasted.
but in Brunei, it was not possible to resign for various reasons: firstly, because the children had to finish high school, and secondly, secondly, it wasn't fair on Maria who, understandably was fed up, like myself, with moving. Thirdly, I was getting older and less and less employable. Once you were over 55 as a teacher, it became very difficult for me to get a job anywhere, even with an educational doctorate and three Masters degrees doctoral degree. nobody told me. I found it out for myself the hard way
So, I had to stay for 9 years in Brunei
The first few years in Brunei were much better than in Australia, in so many ways. The children were doing well at school. Maria and I both had jobs, but somehow, I still felt anxious. The doctor told me I had become addicted to the stressful life in Australia. He wasn't a widely respected GP, but I liked him well enough. He said my body had become addicted to adrenalin. So, In the early years in Brunei, with less stress, I was experiencing 'withdrawal' symptoms from lack of Adrenalin! . That is why, he said, i felt depressed. Maybe it sounds a bit Irish, but it seemed logical enough to me at the time, and I couldn't think of a better explanation.
But he definitely did the wrong thing: he started me in Xanax to help me relax. This is an anti-anxiety drug which worked very well for me during the day when i was working. It calmed me down. But i started using it at night to get me to sleep. I woke up after 4 hours and that was not enough sleep if I had to work the next day . The problem was it was highly addictive, so after about 2 years at Menglait I was addicted to Xanax and had to take more and more. There were side effects of Xanax.
The stress levels increased as the nine years progressed, as we started to think about where the children would go after they left high school, and what we would do when CFBT finally terminated me.
'
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