Painting and story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

In small towns people stick to simple rituals. Actually it was one of my colleagues at the university; a blind professor, who taught me that. Small towns have mostly simple things to do, more practical things, and if one starts to want more, one will leave. So it’s a kind of choice when people start to crave more. They generally leave. Those that stay must abide by the nature of a small town and keep their hopes small.

So it’s a bit tricky to start a school here. People have been on my back. This will not work, people don’t do that, they don’t do this, why not change that and you’ll get more students. Call it English Conversation, for goodness sake! For a few weeks I thought I was just being proud. But whilst talking to someone I realized that I was just being stubborn. Of course things are difficult when they are new. Of course it would be easier to do what everyone recognizes. That’s why things stay the same, and that’s why my university backed down on its vision for the future and settled for a safe and steady past. But that’s also why I am here, doing this.

I have a lot of time to think about what I’m trying to do. It isn’t easy to get a picture; one pixel at a time, one conversation at a time, it falls into place. I am making a school for people to become stronger people.

It’s a simple school, and very cheap –  ten dollars for an hour, and you can come if you want with no reservation and if you don’t come next week nobody will say a thing. A nice idea but if I don’t find an awful lot of people who want to do that I’m sunk. Still it’s worth a try. Here, where high rents and expensive lifestyles are not going to get in the way of a simple idea. I’m trying to find teachers to fill up three rooms four afternoons a week. People can come in and decide on the spot what they want to do, or they can come with one thing in mind and stick to that. Alongside my courses, which are english and art based, there is one on history and one on presentation. Now I am looking for more classes and more teachers. I want a simple course on philosophy. A simple course on psychology. Voice training. Education, especially a class on how people learn. An introduction to Complex Systems, and another on systems theory. One on management, one on leadership. High level reading and writing in Japanese. Business writing. Meditation. Book keeping. Local Ecology. New Media. Local architecture. See? Simple.

There is not much I can do at the moment to solve my problem of having no students. So I am taking a bunch of flyers with me every time I walk a dog, and putting them in the letter boxes of apartment blocks. This semester runs till the middle of February. The one from the middle of February might just be a really good one.