The good, the bad and the mucusy

I got a letter this morning, and one section sums up what this week has been like for me. “Life keeps reminding us that it consists of both good and bad, but up there it is completely undeniable. Must of us cluster on the coast trying to make our lives all good, and therefore living in fear of the bad.”

Life up here is as wild as the land we all live on. We may be able to influence it but we can never control it. On Sunday night my chest began to feel like someone had placed a rock on my sternum. It was how I felt when I had pneumonia only a couple of months ago but I didn’t have a fever so I had some vitamins and had an early night.

On Monday my voice was croaky and I had begun to cough. The children asked me ‘miss, why do you have a rusty voice?’ When I woke up on Tuesday I had no voice at all, but with no sick leave and absolutely no one who could take my class I went in to school again. The day was a game with the children to see if they could interpret my sign language. They did a magnificent job. They read the big book by themselves. I had to act out words they didn’t know and they were overjoyed when they could guess them correctly. The one boy in the class who can read interpreted instructions written on the board ‘go and open your red books’ etc. Instead of asking me how to spell words they began asking each other. They worked together and supported each other. I was excited to see the shift from the beginning of the year where they fought with each other and called each other dumb if they didn’t know something.

The assistant teacher told me a fable about this. She said ‘a fisherman goes out to fish for crabs. There are white fella crabs and Aboriginal crabs. He caught a bucket of each but fell asleep in his boat. The white fella crabs crawled on top of each other and all of them crawled out of the buckets and to freedom. But every time an Aboriginal crab began to crawl out, the other crabs would pull him back into the bucket.’

My children were so beautifully behaved and I was proud of them. Just before lunch time one girl came up to me with her work. She pointed to each part, then to the blank part at the bottom and shrugged her shoulders. I pointed to the blank part and motioned for her to draw. She repeated my motion of drawing and then shrugged her shoulders again. I pointed to all her work and then motioned again to draw it all. Then she understood, smiled and gave me the thumbs up. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t deaf, I just had no voice but of corse I was unable. By lunch time, most of the children were signing to me rather than speaking. My room has never been so quiet.

I dragged myself to the staff meeting after school and went straight home to bed. By Wednesday I was feeling quite unwell and the novelty of another silent day had worn off for me and the children. I was grumpy and they responded accordingly, and became more difficult. One of the assistant teachers came and did art with my students. She made a giant paper mache turtle and seeing that I was sick she reached into her bag and pulled out some goo which she rubbed on my neck. I was a little alarmed at first but then I felt a heat radiate into my neck. She told me to put some on my chest and it felt like someone had poured warm scented water into my chest cavity. She told me shyly that it was bush medicine. Then she whispered ‘I don’t trust those white man tablets, not natural’. I was inclined to agree. She told me that she would come around to my house that night with a barrel of boiling bush medicine that I could put in the bath and bathe in.

By that night I had become feverish and was feeling very unwell. I decided to go to the clinic in the morning. I was sleeping on the couch when there was a knock at the door. I struggled to my feet, and opened it, ready to see this lovely large Aboriginal woman. When I opened the door there was a little, white, blond girl. My brain, slow on the uptake said ‘hi, come in’. Then I realized it was Christine Jauncy…one of my favourite people in the world. She is generous, fun, talented, big-hearted, and happy, all rolled up in a massive bundle of coolness. For a moment I threw off the blanket of fever and unwellness and leapt into her arms. We both jumped up and down for a while until I was overcome with a fit of coughing and had to sit down. She had driven all the way from Sydney, and had Borroloola as a stop just for me. She came with her flatmate and her 2 lovely children.

Amanda had been at the pub watching the State of Origin and had told one of the nurses that I was not well. Concerned, the nurse came to check my chest after the game. She diagnosed mild pneumonia and went to the clinic to get me some antibiotics and other medicines and instructed me severely to take the following day off work, not only for my sake but for the children which was fair enough. I took the following day off work and slept all day, leaving Christine to explore the huge metropolis that is Borroloola.

I got up from my sleep and went into work to finish my reports which were due the next day. I had been organised and thought I just had to check what I had done, only to discover to my great distress that I had not even begun the reports and had been working on something completely different. I had hours of work ahead of me, by best friend waiting at home for me, and lungs that had decided to conduct their own mutiny. Nearing tears I sat for a few hours on a tiny blue kindy chair, with parts of my buttock hanging off one side as I typed in information, cursing the day I decided to become a teacher.

I went home, climbed into my purple onesie that mum sent me, and trudged across the road to Ryans house to sleep as Christine and the kids were bunking down in my room.

On Friday I was beginning to feel a little better, and went to the sports carnival. I finished my reports, noting with each hour with tentative excitement that I was beginning to feel better. My voice began to return. I finished my reports and high fived the kids as they ran and jumped and threw their way through the day. Christine, Katch and the kids even sat on the oval with their red Barra shirts on. Perhaps a little different to what they had planned. I sent them off to Carranbarrini, a national park with amazing rock formations, and I stole more health back as I slept all afternoon. We went to the pub for dinner that night and I watched the teachers leave for the long weekend. I had long resigned myself to a lonely long weekend, but as Saturday dawned, I felt almost normal, and we all jumped in the car and went on a road trip.

We drove all day, the 5 of us, a car and a trailer. I had dreaded the thought of travelling 600km with a 5 and an 8 year old but they were brilliant. They were so quiet I had to keep checking that they were there. We got to the Barunga festival and went in search of the school bus with the teachers from school in it. When we got through the gates and saw how huge the place was we gave up and found a tree to camp under. Just as we finished setting up camp, and the sun had set, I realized that the bus we camped next to was the Borroloola school bus. We made an appatising meal of rice and potatos and then headed to the main stage. I didn’t stay for long before getting tired and wandering back to the camp site. Christine and I sat and chatted under the moonlight, with the slight smell of gas as the burner illuminated pale gum tree, with its sqiggly veins.

Once I stopped coughing, I slept well, cosy and warm in my purple onesie. We slept under a mosquito net, staring up into the stars and the full moon casting its silver shadow onto the camp.

We had breakfast, and after a foiled attempt to kidnap Christine and stuff her into the car, we left them there, waving sadly as we pulled out. She had come for a few days with 3 people I didn’t know, and they slotted into life like they had always been here. I missed them before they were even out of view.

I jumped into the nurses car with Amanda and we went into Katherine to get supplies. I bought 2 pairs of jeans, a belt and spent ridiculous amounts of money on food at Woolworths. I even treated myself to a current Sydney Morning Herald, which set me back $6. We headed back to Borroloola, stopping for a quick swim in the thermal pools at Mataranka before tackeling the 550km back to ‘the Loo’. 

And so this week has been…where life happens, where good and bad are so entwined that they are merely present, neither exists without the other, so neither should be singled out and sought. I felt so unwell but there were flickers of life, love and humanity that would otherwise have remained hidden. My children worked together to learn, a quiet Aboriginal woman opened her culture to me in a touch and the millennia of knowledge in her bush medicine, a nurse who was willing to come over in the middle of the night to listen to my chest, Christine who made soup, and Katch who beat mucus from my lungs. I will not seek good, nor bad, rather I will accept that they are twins in the womb of life.