Mara
Rockliff
children's
author - educational writer
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by Mara Rockliff
SCBWI Bulletin, July-August 2007
The route taxi careened down the left side of the road, swerving around potholes, blasting its horn at pedestrians, narrowly missing a small black goat. Wedged into the backseat with a huge woman in a shiny pink suit and fancy hat, a glum-faced teenager with headphones, and a graying “Rasta-man,” I gripped the rusted handle of the door, praying it wouldn’t pop open and spill me out. Suddenly, the driver yanked the wheel to the side and hit the brakes, announcing, “Primary school!”
I peered through the chain-link fence at the crowds of children in navy-blue uniforms milling around. Jagged rocks poked through the dust of the bare schoolyard, and a stray dog loitered by the fence, hungrily eyeing the chickens pecking in the dirt. The children stared at me without smiling. This is what you wanted, I reminded myself. Now you get to see the real Jamaica.
“A school visit to Jamaica!” friends back in Virginia had exclaimed enviously when I told them of my plans. “How did you swing that?”
It wasn’t hard to guess what they were picturing: an all-expenses-paid trip to a tropical paradise—you know, just one of the countless glamorous perks enjoyed by the average children’s writer. Of course, many authors do get payment and accommodations for international visits to schools, typically in cosmopolitan spots such as Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, or Vienna. This, however, was a slightly different kind of international school visit.
“Easy,” I explained. “I volunteered.”
The area
around Port Antonio, on the northeast coast of Jamaica, is somewhat
“off the
beaten path.” Tucked away from the giant resorts and cruise ship ports,
small
seaside villages like Long Bay, where my family was staying, attract a
mix of
Kingston professionals, European budget travelers, and American
hippies. Still,
being a tourist is being a tourist, and I was hoping for more: a chance
to
experience Jamaican culture, make new friends, and give a little
something
back. So I emailed the owner of the small hotel where we would be
spending our
first week, and she agreed to arrange for me to meet the principals of
several
local schools and offer to visit their classrooms. With my hopes came worries. What if the kids couldn’t understand my accent? Would they think me stupid for not understanding their patois? What if my picture book, with its images of masked raccoons instead of mongooses, and trees topped by thick crowns of leaves instead of skinny fronds, simply meant nothing to them at all?
I quickly discovered that I had nothing to worry about. Many of the children knew someone who lived in or had traveled to “the Big Up There,” as I heard one man call the United States. And while their knowledge of my country might be sketchy—“How can you speak English?” one girl asked me—they enjoyed comparing what they saw to what they knew. The owl, for instance, was familiar, and they taught me its local name: patooh. On the other hand, in every school I visited, the picture of the white-tailed deer invariably met with the same Santa Claus-inspired chorus: “REINDEER!”
For me, the contrast between Jamaican schools and those I’d visited in the United States was powerful: One school was a barn-like concrete building with no walls between the classrooms, only blackboards; I grew hoarse shouting over the hubbub, and I wondered how the teachers managed every day. At another, the girls’ bathroom was an outhouse with doorless stalls and no toilet paper. Nearby, a sign on the door of the school’s library said it was open for an hour twice a week. When I went inside, I saw shelves lined with battered copies of my own childhood favorites; nearly every book was at least thirty or forty years old.
I soon learned that flexibility was key. If I told a principal my presentation worked best with children in grades one through four, she’d take me straight to the fifth grade. If I asked to take students outdoors, where it was quieter, the teacher would pleasantly explain why it was quite impossible; later, I’d see the same class carrying their desks outside. And if students whispered while I spoke, their teachers “quieted” them with a torrent of angry shouts and ruler thwacks.
Some surprises were delightful. There were the school lunches: homemade curried chicken with cornmeal dumplings over peas and rice, or Jamaica’s national dish, scrambled ackee and saltfish. There was the teacher who entertained us with an impromptu performance of her “dub poems,” accompanied by a student on the drum. Best of all, there were the children, who soon lost their shyness and crowded around me to ask questions like “How much are you?” (They wanted to know my age, not my price.)
Travelers
hoping to leave the beaten track will find guidebooks and agencies
touting
everything from backcountry treks to “reality tours.” But volunteering
to do
school visits on your vacation offers a unique chance to get behind the
scenes.Just one of the many perks enjoyed by the average children’s writer!
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© 2007 Mara Rockliff. All rights reserved.