School/Spring Updates

Several things have happened over the last couple weeks and as usual I have been swamped, so I will go over some updates on the highlights.

First of all the weather, right on cue, on the first day of spring it was warm(er) and sunny, the day before large cracks in the ice on the lake started to appear, on the equinox the cracks widened considerably throughout the day, every few hours they seemed to have doubled. M was excited about all the non-frozen water on the lake. By the end of the day the ice was drifting with only the edges of the lake still immobile and 99% of the snow was melted. Today the ice and snow seem like a distant memory. This far north it is like a switch is flipped, spring comes so suddenly. Now the sun is up for a long time, fields are turning green, and crocuses and Schneeglockchen (little snow bells) are up everywhere. The Winterlinger are already fading. (And I learned the German word for pansy flowers from a neighbor that was planting them earlier this week, Stiefmuetterchen, literally "little step mother") The trees are still sticks however.

OK, now about the school. We went to the emergency parents meeting. Actually the headmaster, who has barely spoke to us much at all before, suggested that we attend and pointed it out to V. In true form (for us) we went to the school, waited, and no one was there. Then V made some calls and found out the meeting was in a different town completely, so we drove there as quickly as we could but of course we were late. It was at one of the parents house and the adults were crowded around a dining room table while the kids all played together in apparent chaos. We learned along the way that this was a subset of parents that wanted to keep the current teachers (and our families made up half the kids in the school), it was a "by invitation only" meeting and were meeting to see what to do. Apparently, people had joined the school "club" that did not even have kids in the school and were now trying to shut it down. Out of respect for their privacy, because what is said here could get back to the people involved, I will not go into many details about what they discussed. However, I suspect they were suspicious of us at first (being Americans and all the stereotypes that entails, individualistic unilateral corporate military authority ...) and asked if we wanted to say anything. I told them that what was important to us was our kids, and having this school available was one of the main reasons we were able to stay and live and work in Germany; we had a horrible experience with the public school before, and that the headmaster and teachers have done a wonderful job helping our kids adjust to living here and couldn't be thanked enough for their work, and that we were very concerned about what our options would be now that they are trying to take over the school and convert it to more like a German public school. The group really brightened up when I said this and they saw that we were on their side.

A relevant observation that many Germans themselves agree with me on, one central point I see in German culture is an insistence on "the one right way" to do things, and anything else is wrong by default and has to be corrected. Also, in the US we are taught while growing up not to turn other people in for breaking minor rules, i.e. not to tattle-tale or snitch to the teacher, police or whoever is in authority. In Germany it is quite the reverse, people are encouraged to point out rule breaking from an early age and to "correct" others. Rather than being embarrassed they are proud to do this, even as adults and other adults encourage this behavior. It seems childish to us, but many things seem childish across cultures--because one part of cultural differences are the very things that children do spontaneously and adults are trained not to do (the other part is the things we are trained to do additionally that do not come spontaneously). To be fair, while to Americans it seems like Germans worship authority, to Germans it seems like Americans behave childishly in their distrust of authority. Also, Americans are more likely to trust the actions of private corporations but distrust the government while it is the opposite with Germans (trust the government, distrust private organizations).

So, to get back to the school, there is a compulsion from other people in the community to fix the school, because it is wrong, private and does not teach things like the public German schools do, even if their own kids do not attend. Identifying and removing dissidents is a part of any culture, but in this respect it is especially strong here and we are up against a central issue in German culture. Anyway, we are now part of the "resistance" parents. Some of them are very upset, after all they created this school for their children and went through the long struggle of getting it officially recognized and all the financial and legal battles over the last five years, only to have it taken away from them now. Several of them also had babies that they wanted to eventually attend (the headmaster has a one month old just born, before he was fired). At least one of them said they wished they could leave the country to raise their kids, actually one parent did move to Ireland a few weeks before (and these are German parents, not foreigners like us).

Aside from the obvious negative aspects and our concern over what will happen with our kids and school, there was a bright side. While driving home I felt good about something and realized, this is the first time we have really been a part of a group in the local community. For the first time it wasn't just us alone against the world, we were part of a group that shared our concerns that is against the system.

So the next day we took our kids to drop them off at the school. There was a huge work truck double parked in the drop off area and sure enough, "the gardener" was sitting in the truck, smoking a cigarette, and watching the school ominously. The "occupation" had arrived. I took our "resistance" kids into the school, later when picking them up the gardener was standing outside the building watching the place. Sometimes it almost feels like I am in a movie.

The mid-week V flew back to the US for a week and I had the kids on my own. Easter break is coming up and the last night of school there is an overnight sleepover at the school that the kids are looking forward to. The kids are still sad the teachers are all leaving but we are just trying to keep everything going as is until something becomes resolved. Things are going OK. One afternoon I have a nice chat with the headmaster and we worry about what will happen to the kids that attend the school. He points out a pile of cardboard boxes that was dumped on one of the walkways around the school rather than being cleaned up (the parents have rotating responsibility to clean the school) and said it was symptomatic of the problems occurring. Over the weekend I take the kids to a park and they play for a long time and do really well. It feels good to get outside for so long and let them run around. Then on Monday I go to drop them off at the school and something is wrong. There are hardly any cars there and some strange people are standing around staring at us as we walk in. Most of all, "goatee," who appeared to be a ringleader of the opposition during the school meeting where the teachers were fired (and does not have kids that attend), was standing in the road talking to the headmaster. I went in and talked to F. It turns out the opposition took some kind of additional action, and rather than the headmaster and current teachers finishing out this school year until replacements can be hired, the headmaster is now barred from entering the school, school is closed for the rest of the week, and the overnight before Easter is canceled. They are sending the kids back home with their parents. I am stuck in a bad situation because I have a job and the kids on my own until V gets back. Legally the kids can not go to work with me and we have an absolutely required, once yearly safety briefing the next day. Plus we have a neighbor that can create problems and it is not legal for the kids to be home alone... F said not to worry about it, he would volunteer and watch the kids at the school unofficially for me and a couple other parents. It is too bad that he is being fired.

V returned from the US on Wednesday and we drove to the Hamburg airport to pick her up (no more spending all day on the trains to get back and forth to the airport!). She brought back some food that we can't get here: black beans, collard greens, black-eyed peas, okra (which unfortunately was canned, you can't transport fresh vegetables), canned sweet corn!!! I stared at the labels on the cans for a while. It looked really strange to see everything, down to the tiny writing on the ingredients, written in English (and Spanish in some cases). I have been here for over two years, with only a few days back in the US at a meeting over a year ago, and now not seeing German on labels looks very strange to me.

OK, so now Easter break has started. It is not clear what will happen when school is supposed to start back up, or if it will be closed for some time. Anyway, T and I have a trip together later in the summer (part of my promise last fall to do more traveling with the kids while we lived here), but first I have a trip with M this break, we leave on Monday, she is very excited, and I will write more about that next.