Corruption at its Finest

July 7, 2008 10:56pm
(OLD. AGAIN.)

By the time I finally upload all of these entries to my blog, it will be pages and pages. It makes me feel like a loser. Oh well. Rob just read some of my entries that I have yet to post to the blog and he had a few good laughs at what I wrote. We're getting along well together, which for obvious reasons makes the trip much more enjoyable. It's good that I am pretty cynical about America and American cultures. It gives us a decent amount of things to talk and joke about.

Today was really intense. Yesterday we were told that today would be relaxed. We were told that we would get to sleep in an hour later, and that the day could be spent doing whatever we needed to do to get ready. I asked repeatedly if we would get to see Helen today, because there were many things that we needed to discuss, and the headmaster said yes, she would be there. We didn't get to sleep in—the headmaster came pounding on our doors much earlier than he said he would. We were then driven to the staff room at the school, where we sat for a long time. They seem to do a lot of sitting here, actually, and it is one of my main complaints. No one seems to know exactly what is going on besides the corrupt people in charge (yes, corrupt, I'll get to that later), and the rest of the staff is content to sit in the staff room, which is really just a crappy room with a few run-down couches and some water, talking, sleeping, or just sitting. Maybe it comes from my strict regiment of "Procrastination is Death" from junior year of high school, but sitting around for endless hours waiting for something to happen drives me crazy. I hate wasting time and I hate not being proactive. It seems to be the norm here—especially among those in the lower ranks—but I am not used to it at all and it just seems very inefficient to me.

Anyway, so we were waiting in the room. I asked Fanny when Helen was coming, and she replied with her standard answer of "sorry I do not know" (which, admittedly, is better than her answering "yes," which is what she does when she doesn't understand the question). She is always very reluctant to ask the headmaster things, which I understand because he has much more power than she does and she wants to maintain good standing, but I asked her to ask the headmaster when Helen was coming. He apparently said he would call her. About 40 minutes later (40 minutes of sitting in a foreign, wonderful place doing absolutely nothing. I was going mad), Fanny got a call saying that Helen was not picking up her phone. We waited a little while longer (by this time I was ready to beat something out of frustration) and then I asked Fanny if I could use her phone to call Helen. Helen picked up right away and said that the headmaster had never called her, and she had been waiting for a phone call since yesterday, when the headmaster told her to leave because she wasn't needed. Rob and I went through the roof. The headmaster lied to us as a way of keeping Helen away from us.

We were very pushy and finally met with Helen. We ran some errands in Anyang, which was wonderful. We rode in motorcycle taxis, which are obviously dangerous but very authentic, we walked the pedestrian streets in the older shopping section of the city, and we bought some things in the supermarket. Just being out and about in Anyang put me in such a better mood. We hadn't done that yet because we were constantly being babied and managed. It was getting frustrating.

We went back to the school to meet with the headmaster, but he was not there. Fanny called him, and all the headmaster said was that he would be back at the school "later." So once again we were expected to sit in that staff room doing literally nothing for several hours. It wasn't bad because Helen's English is spectacular and we had a lot to talk about, but still. It's hierarchy stuff at its finest, for sure: everyone runs their lives around what is convenient for the one in charge, and Fanny was obviously not supposed to ask him any specific questions about time or schedule. We just wait.

Once he came back, we talked about all the details of the program that they had neglected to talk to us about before. We didn't know the size of the classrooms, the ages of the kids, the hours of the day, where we will be living, where we will be sleeping... the whole shebang. Helen got all of that straightened out, but there were some problems that became very ugly very quickly. The headmaster arranged for us to work much more each week than our contract said. He got very angry and snappy with Helen when she stood up for us. He criticized her and told her that we were fine without her and that she wasn't needed, which is absurd. The only reason he thought we were fine before was because there was nobody to translate adequately between us! Fanny is nice, but her English is fairly poor (yes, she's an English teacher) and it is not her job to confront her boss. The headmaster tried to keep Helen away from us so that we would not be able to question the schedule he had arranged for us. He basically wanted to prevent us from having any sort of power or voice whatsoever, so by having his employees follow us around, we were forced to do what was best for him. Anyway, there was intense conversation in Chinese for about 15 minutes. Then there was a long pause. Helen looked stunned, and was a little red. She told us that he just told her to get out of the office and that she is not needed. Rob and I told her to tell the headmaster that if she goes, we go, and that we would not work for someone who treats her poorly, as she is our hired representative from Orbis.

Oh, hang on a second. One important detail I left out: the headmaster showed us the contract that Henan Province had given him about working with Orbis (Orbis works through the province). The contract said nothing about the number of hours a day. Rob left to call Hank, one of the Orbis employees who is stationed in China to help us, and Hank said that there is another part of the contract that the headmaster did not show us that clearly specifies the number of hours a day. Another lie.

Anyway, when Rob left the room angry to go call Hank and explain how inflexible and awful the headmaster was being, all of a sudden the headmaster agreed to everything we wanted. He had a huge smile on his face and, in his very bad accent, said "Robert it is ok, everything ok, we are friends, ok, ok" and tried to shake Rob's hand. Rob would have none of it (he is very proud of how he played this out) and left to go call Hank with the headmaster chasing after him. Hell yes, that is how it is done.

Helen came out with us into the hallway (this was right after the headmaster yelled at her and told her to leave) and she was very shaken. She hugged me a few times and she looked like it was going to cry. I hated the headmaster at that moment.

Later that evening, the headmaster apologized and kept smiling at us and saying we were friends. He told me repeatedly "how beautiful you are" and things like that. He's a very slimy fellow; I don't trust him at all. It is unfortunate that he is like that, but I get the feeling that many people in his position are. His school is one of the worse schools in the area, and he is trying to develop it and is competing with everyone else. He wants what is best for his school so that it gets better and he gets more money, and if that means exploiting other people, that's what he will do. In China where there are so many people (there are 100 million people in Henan province alone) and everything is still in the process of developing, I imagine you often have to step on other people to get where you want to be. I have just never experienced it in such proximity. I have lost pretty much all respect for the headmaster. He's extremely corrupt, and while I'm not entirely surprised that someone in his position would be, I still can't respect it. It's hard to like a person who tries to outsmart you and then acts like it was just a big misunderstanding.

So now Helen will always stay with us, which is excellent. I hope all the misunderstandings have been smoothed out. Actually, Helen will always stay with me in my room. I'm really happy about that. It's nice having company and we get along really well, so it will be nice to make one more foreign friend on this trip. Spending time with her is nice. She takes good care of us without smothering us, and it is clear she is very happy to be helping. She's very curious about everything English, but she also definitely has the best English out of anyone here so far. If I had to teach her English, I'm not sure what I would teach. Her vocabulary is awesome.

Ok, bed time. Class tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.

~~
PS: Rob just read over this and told me that I forgot to talk about the park. This morning, when we were killing some time when waiting for Helen, Fanny took us to the local park. It's really nice, with little pagodas here and there, beautiful Asian style bridges, and gargoyles here and there. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised—we are in China, after all...