The Ghetto

What's great about my job is that every week I'm sent somewhere new. That might not be ideal for everyone, but I like it. I get to see so much to the point where my flatmate has said I'm seeing parts of the city that he's never been to in 30 years of living here.

However, it has to be said that the parts I'm seeing are pretty dodgy. Somehow they are getting progressively dodgier. The first couple of schools I was sent to were in neighborhoods where I felt uncomfortable. I wasn't scared exactly, but I was looking over my shoulder. I definitely wasn't taking out my camera.

Then, after a week, I went to the next neighborhood where I was actually nervous walking around at eight o'clock in the morning and surrounded by people. It got a little worse when school let out. A popular local pass time seemed to be to form gangs in front of the bookies.

Then there was today. I was supposed to go to the 'roughest' school, but the classes I got were full of relatively good kids. By relatively good I mean that after they started to misbehave I was slowly able to reign them in. This is in contrast to a class last week that, more or less, refused to listen no matter what I did.



The neighborhood was run down. Shops were boarded up, or dilapidated. There wasn't a smile on anyone's face. Some very drunk people were on the bus (3:45pm) and one guy just decided to light up a cigarette in the middle of the aisle. But this 'roughest' school was easy. This is the school where I heard about a 9-year-old girl smashing another in the face during lunch time. There was also the time when one student repeatedly stabbed another in class with a pencil because the stabbee didn't like the stabbers drawing.

When I walked into the school I was ready. I had two momentary setbacks. The first was when the teacher I was replacing forgot that she was supposed to be on a training course...meaning she had prepared no instructions for me. The second setback was when the teacher told me that she had been planning on giving the kids saws -- yes, saws -- so that they could make picture frames. They were 7 years old.

But somehow the day went well. No thumbs were lost. The only slip was when the kids were going crazy just before the final bell rang and I said "God, you guys are loud!" There were some gasps and a quick silence.

It's a Catholic school. They did not approve of my language. I guess everyone has their own version of acceptable and non-acceptable.