Dear Varsity,

It was with slight trepidation that, five minutes into an impromptu Créole lesson, and much to the delight of my somewhat unlikely teachers (a sixty-year-old colleague and her straight-backed, wide-eyes students), I repeated back to them the English equivalent of indispensible phrasal knowledge they had just imparted; ‘How are you?’, ‘I’m fine’, and ‘your mother’s a cunt’. This peculiar situation immediately took me back nine years to a formative moment in a London theatre; hands clasped with, on one side, my mother, and on the other, a quasi-lesbian Orthodox Jew, screaming ‘CUNT!’ together repeatedly at the baffling on-stage duo of Tamara Beckwith and Germaine Greer during The Vagina Monologues, although I doubt the Créole lesson had much to do with feminist notions of reclaiming language...

Other pedagogic gems were to be found in students’ questions - posed in the earnest pursuit of information and entirely unaware of the gleeful inward derision they provoked in their new assistant- including ‘I am like a dog?’ (an inspired response to ‘what are you like?’), the rather open-ended ‘how many ghosts are there?’, as well as the potentially incriminating ‘do you like young boys?’. The undisputed highlight of the week, however, was one student’s enactment of an arm amputation accompanied by insistent muttering of the word ‘ants’, in an ostensible, yet ultimately futile, attempt to elucidate a comprehension passage about Mexican emigration. Hopefully a writing exercise set for 240 Guadeloupian children as homework after meeting me, titillatingly entitled ‘Haxie’s Life’, proves a more fruitful task.

Away from school, life is consecrated to the somewhat perilous quest for paradisiacal beaches. Yesterday this consisted of scrabbling up into the mountainous jungle at the heels of 3 young gangsters-in-waiting, towels slung reassuringly over their shoulders. After negotiating such obstacles as burnt-out vine-entangled car shells and sarong-lacerating barbed wire balls, we struggled through a small hole in a security fence and descended a near-vertical cliff face with all the grace of wombats on crack. Only then did we realise that we’d in fact landed clandestinely on the roof of a Club Med restaurant, the powder blue sea glimmering before our imposturous eyes. Maybe I should spend more time around young boys after all...

Haxie  x