My Day with Xa

Perks of teaching the Timor Leste army officer corps: you get your hand shook (with a little extra squeeze, if my girlish heart not deceive me) by world-famous guerilla veteran Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao. He may be named after a mere ‘50s revival band but he had the bugles blasting and the sweat rolling from everyone on the base as we waited for the royal presence. At 2pm, the very hottest point of a very hot and humid day – after everyone had busied themselves wrestling the local snakes and cleaning up the tropical foliage – he appeared. After a grand entrance, he dawdled around the school in a swarm of photographers and video-production crews (apparently they follow him around all day). He came into the teachers’ room, shook our hands, then immediately fixated on a squeeze toy shaped like a pig, which he picked up and squoze repeatedly, cracking himself up. All the military personnel maintained decorum like Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers film. * Next, he went around the classrooms. * All my students were sitting uncharacteristically upright in dress uniform, completely silent when Xa (I call him Xa now that we’ve shaken hands) entered the class. My students were so respectful and overawed that they were completely useless, which was fine because all he wanted were straight men to lob his cracks out of the park. He looked at a drawing I’d done on the white board featuring two misshapen humanoids and asked the class “Which one is Katherine?” Then he picked up my lesson plan and pretended to study it in detail. After that, he approached one of the more solemn students and asked how long he’d been in the course. Another student, an inveterate blurter, cried out, “Two years!” * Xa looked the blurter up and down and said, “I wasn’t talking to you!” He wandered over to another student and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “What do you think, is Katherine a good teacher?” Alfred said, “Yes!” Xa wanders up to me and says, “They are afraid of you! I should make you go outside so they tell me the truth!” “Yes, that’s why I stayed!” I wittily replied. “If anyone gives you any trouble, send me a letter!” he said, eyeing everyone. Then he and the entourage left. For about five minutes, my students were very flustered, rifling through their papers, looking at their nails or just looking straight ahead in a daze.