Lospalos projects

Wednesday, day 31

We have just had 2 days of ‘Loron Boot’ – (literally ‘big days’) that are holy days when most things are closed and everyone spends time at the cemetery and at church, honouring and remembering the dead of their family. Therefore, today has been my first day in Lospalos when I’ve been able to meet with government and NGO people who are relevant to my residency.

Mana Er and I spent an active morning meeting up with these people today. We started at the Ministry of Education and Culture, where we had a very positive and productive conversation with the senior man there. I talked about the composing work that I do with children, and he asked lots of questions about numbers of participants, age groups, and so on. One of the things I have been concerned about is the practicality of making projects happen in the school holidays – essentially my time in Lospalos coincides exactly with school holidays! But today I learned that Sr Abilio was quite relieved that I wasn’t trying to do something in November or February, as those months were already choc-a-block full of activities. I told him about my idea for creating an event of some kind at the end of January, and seeing if we could invite people from Dili to travel to Lospalos in order to attend (and at the same time enjoy a weekend in this beautiful part of the country), and he was quite excited about this.

For me, I was thrilled to learn that Sr Abilio runs a traditional music and dance ensemble. I explained that I was particularly interested in learning to play traditional instruments, and he seemed very open to me joining in with their rehearsals – they meet three afternoons a week.

Thus I am starting to see a schedule of some kind present itself, where I can spend my mornings working with groups, on projects that run for up to five days in a row, and some afternoons with Sr Abilio’s group, and others on my own at home, developing work and ideas further.

We met with two other local NGOs as well, and I am starting to see it could all get very busy, very quickly!

At this stage though, I am only in Lospalos for a few more days. On Saturday I go back to Baucau, then on Sunday afternoon I am back in Dili. I am getting back a couple of days before my scheduled flight back to Melbourne as I am still to collect my visa extension and passport from the Immigration office – it seemed prudent to allow extra time to ensure that I get this well before heading to the airport!

Atauro Island

Sunday, day 14

Our little household spent the weekend on Atauro Island, about 2 hours by boat from the Dili Port. Shona and Craig had planned this weekend away some time ago, and invited Sarah and I along. Atauro is a fabled and special place, an island that must maintain something of a self-sufficient lifestyle, where mountain villages are accessible only on foot, where coral reefs are within metres of the shoreline and that offer superb snorkelling and diving opportunities. Between the island and the mainland the water falls to a depth of 3000 metres – a natural trench. When you go to the outer reef (minutes from the beach by boat) you can swim out to where this mighty drop begins.

Atauro used to be a prison island, during Indonesian times. For many Timorese people it may be synonymous with the terror and secrecy of those times. These days however, it is being touted as a supreme beauty spot and it plays host to not one but two eco-resorts. We stayed in one of these, Barry’s.

I don’t want to find myself writing a travel blog, but I do have to rave about Barry’s, just a little. You can walk to Barry’s from the ferry jetty. You walk through the local market, and when it finishes, you have reached Barry’s. His are the last set of dwellings along that stretch of beach. There are 5 or 6 different cabins, each made with imagination, natural materials, and traditional building techniques. There are drop-toilets and the most glamourous polished concrete mandi shower room you have ever seen. All meals are shared in the dining room (which is actually part of Barry’s family home) so you meet lots of interesting people when you stay there. It’s tranquil and beautiful, you can head off into the backdrop of mountains If you choose, or you can just chill out in the sea or on your own private verandah.

Enough description. Here are some photos:

 

Arriving at Atauro Port, off the Nakroma ferry, Saturday morning

 

 

The local market that you walk through to get to Barry's. Lots of dried fish and giant clams

 

 

Some of the cabins at Barry's

 

 

Fishing boats on the beach, Atauro

 

Dili on a Sunday

I was in the town centre last weekend, looking for somewhere to eat on a Sunday. Not so easy to find! In the meantime, I took some photos.

 

Dili - quiet on a Sunday

 

 

Clouds rolling in in layers - looking towards the port

Fish-seller and motorbike on the Dili esplanade

 

XiHu Lake in Hangzhou

On Day 2 of the CMA [Community Music Activity] Commission Seminar, we had a group excursion to the renowned XiHu Lake (West Lake) which is the reason that Hangzhou is sometimes known as the Garden Paradise of China (or something along those lines).

It’s a famed beauty spot that attracts hordes of tourists everyday, but particularly during the summer holidays, which are in full swing in China. We travelled to the lake by bus, and as we got nearer, the clouds darkened. As we alighted the bus, the first raindrops began to fall. We walked briskly to the traditional dragon boat that would carry us across the water to one of the islands, and once aboard, the rain drops began to fall more frequently. Soon there was thunder, closely followed by lightning. The heavy clouds changed the whole ambience of the area – the outlines of the surrounding mountains became more distinct in their varying shades of grey, and and the bright colours of the dragon boats stood out sharply against this backdrop. I’m not sure the photo below does this justice. After a while I switched to black-and-white photos, to take advantage of the sombre atmosphere.

View from the lake

Dragon boats against the skyline

Fellow travellers

Me, drenched

And not just me

The tide of umbrellas as we made our way back to the bus

Shoes, skyscrapers, shops and subways

I spent my second day in Shanghai exploring further. I set off first to find the Train Ticket Office, located (according to the staff at my hotel) in the pedestrian shopping mall on Nanjing Road East, where it intersects with Central Zheijiang Road. Walk out of the hotel to the main road, turn right, then turn into the third street on the left, then keep walking until you get to Nanjing and look for a little window in a wall somewhere. Armed with the words “train ticket office” written down in Chinese, I got going.

Central Zheijiang St proved to be a great street, filled with interesting local shops. I wandered into a shoe shop and came out with new sandals. The woman guessed my size exactly (and was suitably pleased with herself). They were so comfortable, I wore them the whole day with not a blister to complain of!

In the distance of this street loomed an impressive gold building. A Chinese business built a ‘gold’ skyscraper in Melbourne’s Docklands. It is distinctive as it has a boat shape as its roofline, but even in the glow of sunset, that building never looks gold and I imagine it is a constant disappointment to the people that commissioned it, given the auspicious nature of gold. This golden skyscraper in Shanghai, however, is gold no matter what the sun is doing:

My eyes are constantly gazing upwards, marveling at the beautiful Art Deco architecture. I was struck by the Gotham City quality of one building – it reminded me of the Russell St Police Headquarters in Melbourne (these days a block of apartments). The Train Ticket Office turned out to be a window at the front of this building.

Next I took the metro to South Shaanxi Road, and walked from there into the French Concession district, a leafy residential/embassy area where plane trees cover the streets with lush green canopies. I enjoyed being out of the sun’s reach for a while. There are lots of interesting shops, galleries and cafes in this area. However, I stopped for lunch in a canteen-style coffee shop where the only English I could see was in a NO SMOKING sign, and the words PUSH and PULL on the door. The food was plentiful and all on display. I could point to what I wanted, and was delighted with my selection – broccoli, eggplants, mushrooms, some cabbage (I think) and rice. Finally a more balanced proportion of the five food groups. And for a bargain price.

While I was eating, it suddenly started to rain. How serendipitous, I thought – not only have found such a great place to eat, but to have found it and be eating right when the downpour started!

Next I went to the Taikang Road arts precinct, which was packed with visitors. It’s an interesting array of shops selling silk scarves, hand crafts, paintings and photographs, leather goods. I stopped for coffee at Kommune, where I paid nearly twice the cost of my lunch for an iced coffee. Everything balances up in the end, doesn’t it? Kommune has reproductions of Mao-era propaganda posters on its walls, and I particularly loved seeing the Mao figurines in the fishtank.

I exited the arts precinct and within just a few footsteps found I had left the French Concession district behind me.

I walked to the nearest Metro station (which wasn’t that near), navigating my way through an interchange without incident. In some of the trains they have TV screens and I particularly like it when they show a program about the DOs and DON’Ts of using the Shanghai metro system. The program is hosted by a handsome man with an endearing dimple in his right cheek and a flirty smile. I could imagine him in an ad for Mac products – cheeky, smart, little bit playful and arch. Yesterday’s program showed impatient business men doing things like pulling the Emergency cord, or trying to force the doors open, with a great big red X slamming down on top of the image. Then they show a similar man sighing, and making a call on a mobile phone – big green TICK for him. The key message here? If you are running late, or miss your stop, don’t try and disrupt the entire train service, make a call and tell whoever you’re meeting that you’ll be a bit late.

Today’s episode was about finding unattended luggage. A group of teenage girls is walking along the platform. One trips over a small black wheelie bag. Oh! she says, and she and her friends gather around the bag and open it up (presumably to find out who it belongs to). WRONG! says Dimple Man. In the next scene we see the same group of girls walking with two men in uniforms and pointing out the bag. The two men approach the bag and cover it with a blanket. RIGHT! says Dimple Man. Sweetheart.

There is another ad in this vein which is a cartoon. A sullen, round-shouldered character is lugging a kind of sack over his shoulder. He avoids the bag screening x-ray machine that everyone is supposed to put their bags through when entering the Metro system. (“For everyone’s safety” the signs on the machines remind us). There is a woman (with better posture) who has a smart red-and-white tote bag, and she puts it through the machine. Then the security guards go up to the round-shouldered person and ask to see his bag. They empty the contents out and – I’m not sure what it’s supposed to contain, but I think they find items for making bombs. And then they take the man away and he looks even more sullen and hang-dog than ever.

I enjoy this existence where I can’t speak the language. I am reduced to deciphering and guessing, and filling in the gaps from my own imagination. It’s what my students at Language School have to do all the time, of course. Here I get to do it while being entertained by a completely different style of visual communication, which amuses me no end.

Shanghai

I am in China this week and next, here for the ISME [International Society of Music Educators] biennial conference. First I will be at the Community Music Activity Commission, which meets this coming week in Hangzhou, then in Beijing the following week for the main International Congress. I’m presenting papers at both events, looking at the strategies I’ve developed for developing creative music and composition in ESL classrooms. Hangzhou is only 2 hours by train from Shanghai, so I decided to arrive a few days early and be a tourist.

Yesterday I walked around the Bund, found my bearings somewhat and admired the heritage architecture. There were many, many local tourists (as in, Chinese, not foreigners) who were suitably agog at the sights. The view across the river to the newer Pudong district is filled with space-age skyscrapers. I kept passing groups of out-of-towners resting in the shade, their shoes off. But you won’t see them in the photo below – I feel rude if I point my camera at specific people. I liked the red flags at the top of this building – in the afternoon sun they had a sharpness to them which the photo below doesn’t really do justice to.

I was trying to find the train ticket office to buy my Hangzhou ticket in advance, but after a couple of hours of wandering (and wondering) it was still eluding me. I found myself in East Nanjing St, which is the big shopping mecca, filled with people. This building is home to Jeans West, and hopefully gives you an idea of the number of people who were out shopping on a Saturday afternoon:

I wandered into some alleyways. Lots of these have signs at the entrance, suggesting there are businesses and shops inside that members of the public can go to. The couple that I walked through had blue and green plastic exercise equipment near either entrance, a kind of home-gym opportunity to encourage people to keep fit, presumably. There were chalkboards with what seemed to be community service announcements on them, accompanied by colourful cartoon drawings. They were written in chalk, and could have been rubbed off at anytime. This one explains (I think) that if people are engaging in obnoxious behaviour, sensible citizens should go and get someone in authority to sort it out.

This last set of pictures were more for children, reminding them to do helpful things like pick up rubbish and put it in the bin.

Certainly Shanghai is a very clean city, with the footpaths and roads clear of rubbish. Unlike Paris, which will forever retain the Premier Prix in my mind for street filth. There, I had to keep my eyes on the road because of the steaming mounds of dog poo that seemed to be deposited every hundred metres or so. Here, happily, it is safe to gaze upwards at the beautiful buildings and wander without sidestepping.

Sandy Point

This is the second year that Tiny and I have taken a week’s winter beach holiday down at Sandy Point. We choose a house to rent for the week (open fireplace, full kitchen, close to the beach), and invariably plan a stack of projects we want to do while we are away, then pack up the car and go. Sandy Point is perfect – there isn’t much to do there apart from run on the beach (unless you decide to go further afield, to nearby Wilson’s Prom, or Walkerville, or to Foster for groceries), there’s no internet or mobile phone coverage (or so we thought – we discovered we both had full coverage inside the house this year – ’3′ must have increased their range since last year – and the local cafe has a wireless option now. But fortunately we only found out about that on our last morning!).

The beach at Sandy is wide and long. At one end, as the beach widens further into Shallow Inlet, the wind has sculpted the sand there into ornate dunes – folds and points of sand that get whipped up and re-sculpted on a daily basis. Here are some photos I took on our last morning there, trying to capture the eerie, moon-like sandscape quality.

Pelican pavement art

With all the students from grades prep to 6 now required to play in the one playground area, the Pelican Primary School students have less room to run around than they used to have, and all the big kids and little kids have to share the playing space. It’s resulted in some lovely collaborative play, where the older students have been invited to lead playground activities for the younger students.

Today I witnessed some gorgeous scenes of grade 6 boys encouraging little Preppies to jump rope with them, or try hula-hooping, or kick a soft, squashy soccer ball to each other. Two girls had the idea of setting up a chalk art competition (with a chocolate frog for the winning piece of art). More and more of the school was drawn to this activity so that by the end of lunchtime the drawings covered a large part of the yard. As I walked through, excited children called for me to come and admire their work. Here are some of the winning entries:

It was such a happy  lunchtime. I found it heartwarming, I have to say, especially when I remember how much fighting there used to be in the playground in the past. This is a good, healthy and happy place to be at school, I thought to myself as I took these photographs.

Pitch, implicit learning, and innate understanding

I had another ‘moment’ in my exploration of teaching pitch concepts today. (I’ve been posting on this topic, see below). Today at Pelican Primary School I introduced the Slit Drum to the prep class.

I invited one of the children to come to the front to play. She wasn’t sure what to do, so I suggested she hit each of the ‘tongues’ of wood, one by one, and see if they sound the same or different.

“Hit this long one, and then this short one,” I suggested, pointing to the tongues I meant. So she did that, and one of the boys in the class called out happily, “I can hear that it is short-long-short-long!” And as she continued to play, he sang along with her – “short-long-short-long” – and some others in the class did the same.

It was a happy moment for me. I have been puzzling over ways to build students’ understanding about the concept of pitch, highs and lows. I try to find ways, in the musical environment I create in the lesson, for these concepts to be available to those children who are ready to connect them to their own innate understanding about how music works. Young Will, calling out his observation to me, was doing exactly that. After the puzzles of the recent weeks it was satisfying to be reminded that some children are ready to work with these concepts, and will make the necessary initial links in their own time, if I provide the right environment. I think of this as providing strong environmental scaffolds.

Christ stopped in Echuca

Last week I did a bit of travelling in regional Victoria, presenting Professional Learning courses for teachers who are participating in the Musica Viva in Schools program.

In one town our venue was a church. I think K (the musician I was working with) and I must have been in slightly giddy, overtired moods when we got out of the car and entered the building. We walked into the room we were to present in and were confronted with this sight:

The photo was taken on K’s iPhone – can you read the little signs? (Jesus, God, and Joseph)

“I didn’t know they were coming to this session,” I said to K, and we giggled mercilessly and helplessly about  these signs over the chairs for ages.

Probably you had to be there, but I thought I’d share anyway.

Oh, it was a busy week. I was probably nearing hysteria at that point.