Category Archives: Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Temple

21 Friday Jun 2013

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Lehan temple

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

There wasn’t any way that I could find out why the grandmother decided to take her grandsons out of my school. Actually when I think about it it may well have been this scenario; that they stole money from her again, that she got tired of being nice to them and decided they needed a little more discipline; she was probably right. They had been given a “punishment” that was extraordinarily kind: they came to us and we talked to them about stuff that was interesting to them; I didn’t waste their time giving them stuff that was “good for them”, but rather an intelligent young man told them exciting stuff about history.

They stole from me and then found themselves paying guests in my home, treated respectfully. It must have been some shock to find themselves there. And then they lost that, not in a huge cruel transition of punishment, but rather a small slide into a business-like arrangement: we are now going to prepare you for your future, you will do better at school, our resources will now go into this.

I didn’t do what I did because I have some excess of charity. When I found my money missing I felt so dismayed; here I was about to open a school and there I was with a scandal. But I was thinking a lot about what I wanted my school to be. They used to have these “temple schools” in Japan, before state education was introduced. They were schools of and for the community. And what was the community if it wasn’t the experience of dealing with a problem with children?

I knew that things had just got a lot harder for me. But it wasn’t a challenge I was averse to taking on. I had my own problems with the community. So I tried, firstly by doing what I thought television and media and books and Japanese people had told me, going to the correct institutions and asking for their help; the police, the city hall. And when that didn’t work it wasn’t so serious because the kids themselves had come to me with the problem, and the grandmother too, and I could rely on their family to take ownership of the problem and just do what they wanted.

And it wasn’t just the kids that I liked; they say that kids resemble their grandparents more than their parents, and their grandmother too was very trustworthy. It was just that love of a mother that they didn’t have.

But back to my cat, now long dead. I had believed that he would die in my care, and I had believed that he would be buried in my garden, under a rock, and that when I did the gardening I would look at that rock and I would think of him.

Sakura Hazy

20 Monday May 2013

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lehan Godz

Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Well he died, my cat, just the other day. I heard about it from my student who heard about it from the woman who lives nearby.

My cat was supposed to be living with my student but he ran away on about the second day and wasn’t seen for quite some time after that. Finally he surfaced and it turned out that he was living at the house of a woman who had several cats.

My student took him home for the winter when it was very cold and then he took off again when it got warmer. He says that the woman told him some stories and he will send them to me soon.

I was running a school there, in my house, maybe you all remember that. I had decided I would make the educational program, the curriculum that I believed in. I used to go out and take my dogs for a walk, and some of the cats would come too.

We met these boys with their grandmother, they were about 12, twins, and they were walking with the dog. They were funny kids, they asked if they could visit with their friend and that was also nice. One day those three kids stole a heap of money from me; a heap, and I had been saving up for a wood stove.

When I realized I thought a lot about what to do, and then I went to the Police Box to talk about it with the local policeman. He said it had nothing to do with him, I argued a lot about that, and then I went to the City Hall and argued a lot with them too. I thought it had a lot to do with them, I thought they should really take some interest. We argued a lot, me and the Police, and me and the City Hall, but we generally didn’t get mean.

I thought they were kind of funny even when they didn’t respond like the Police and the City Hall people always responded on the Television. But they didn’t take an interest and anyway one of those kids came round and kind of confessed.

They were such funny kids, even when I had them lined up in a row and was interrogating them in the most severe way possible I couldn’t help but think how funny they were. Really really sweet, and then at the same time total ratbags. We thought you must be rich, they said.

Anyway they had already spent the money trying to make friends, there wasn’t a lot I could do. Eventually I had a visit from the grandmother, she wanted to know if I’d noticed anything stolen from my house. So I told her about the wood stove money. She was a really nice woman. She was going once a month to study about a kind of pastoral education, in Tokyo. She gave me the money back and enrolled the kids in my school.

I asked my student to teach them, because I thought he was a good teacher for them. He told her: it might take a while for their grades to improve, because I’m trying to help them in more things. And I would listen to him teaching the kids, because I usually didn’t have students at that time, and was usually painting a picture or something, and it sounded good. But after a couple of months she came round and took them out of the school. She decided to put them in cram school so their grades would improve.

That was about the time I left.

Centipede

26 Friday Apr 2013

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Centipede

Centipede

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

One thing that I remember so well from my early days with my cat. I used to notice how much he loved to climb the fly-screens over the windows, one day I realized that what he was actually doing was jumping on them and climbing to the level of my head, and that the reason he was doing that was that I would absentmindedly get up and pay him some attention. Generally in the manner of pouring out some cat food for him, or at least wandering over to the window to shoo him down.

I suppose it was at that time that I became aware of him as something more than a cat.

Later on, finding someone to live in my house with him while I went away for an extended period of time, I returned to find him living in an old apartment block, and upon seeing me he returned to live in my house. I went away for ten months, and when I returned he welcomed me, he clearly knew me, I think he may have loved me.

So it’s really my own deception to say that he was just a cat; he was not. He was my cat.

Table

22 Monday Apr 2013

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lehan table

Table

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

When I first moved to Hokkaido I tried to keep my cat inside the house, it was very cold, he was very upset to be moved. But he got out of the house and I couldn’t find him, I looked for two days and called him. On the afternoon of the second day I heard him crying, and I found him up in the machinery of a big truck parked across the road, next to the rice vending machine.

The truck had been gone all the day before, it had returned from its work that afternoon. My cat had crawled up into that truck and it appeared that he had stayed in that truck while it drove all the way to the middle of Hokkaido and back. Did he really do that? Or did he crawl in later when it was warm and he was cold. I don’t know, but I always thought that he travelled all the way to Hokkaido and back in that truck, that’s what I like to believe.

Anyway, he was in his later days a staunchly unidiosynchratic cat who woke me up almost every night we spent together and who would occasionally vomit in the bed at three am, which in the winter was particularly unwelcome.

But he was also measurable in years of days of ordinary life. There were many of them, ordinary days of being, together. He was a cat, and I was not, and I would not be surprised, nor blame him, if he found me uninteresting and if indeed he considered me at all. I think I would be lucky if he did. That was his privilege, as a cat.

He was a cat, and one of the blessed thing about cats is that they are fine company. He was a bit ornery and cranky too, and in wanting to believe that I could manage – to carry him through my own travails – I lived a life way beyond my capabilities. And maybe that was good too, I’m sure even a cat likes a bit of independence sometimes. He found his own patch of sunshine, much more efficiently than I did.

The Kitchen

13 Saturday Apr 2013

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The Kitchen

The Kitchen

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

When I came back from Vietnam I was pretty excited about this orphanage request, I wanted to start a collaboration. I thought that I could get my students and a bunch of old computers and head over there for a workshop.

But there was something that did hold me back even at that time. Which was the question of enduring and permanent change.

Anything that was going to be a temporary distraction was really not going to help anyone but us; myself, who would be using this to advance in my teaching and research career, and my students, who would get a huge explosion of ideas and understandings. For those kids, for that orphanage, it would be like hosting a G8 summit; the glow of warmth and significance and then nothing but an emptier-than-usual larder.

Anything to do with computers and technology dies as soon as somebody doesn’t understand how to fix something, and that something can be as small as how to turn something on. Of course, we could have run around and found local people to get involved.

But wouldn’t the orphanage have thought of that?  Anyway, I’m sure that now, in 2013, there are enough cheap tablets to go round, and plenty more where they came from.
Events caught up with me, and I didn’t do the project, the collaboration. Even then I was really not confident that I could do something that wouldn’t be a waste of their time. I am in two minds about this action that I have taken, this action of doing nothing but spend eight years thinking about what I could do.

If Bill Gates did nothing but sit around thinking about how to cure the world’s malaria, it would achieve as little as I have achieved. Which is nothing.

If we had done something and one child had been positively influenced in some way it would have been better than this nothing. Even just gathering some money together and sending it to the orphanage would have been better than this nothing, surely.

Late Light

08 Monday Apr 2013

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Morning's Late Light

Morning’s Late Light

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
I only went to that orphanage in Vietnam once, so I don’t know much about it. It had a lot of children in it, and a lot of those children were healthy and lively. Then there were the children who were disabled; there are still babies being born who are badly disabled because of Agent Orange, they said, and they were in a pretty terrible condition.

And then there was one little girl who had been abandoned in a field and rats had eaten off her toes. There were rooms full of cribs.

They said that part of the problem with the children was the lingering effect of Communism. When everyone was guaranteed basic life needs many people became disinclined to do anything. Falling onto the people below like a crowd-surfer, believing that they would be held aloft. And that these kids found, for a time at least, that it was easier and more fun to get money out of tourists than it was to work for a company that did so.

We went into the classroom. For some reason I have the impression that the style of teaching was vaguely French, I’m not sure why. I remember that there were severe desks and benches and a severe board and the style was clearly teacher-stands-at-the-front-with-a-stick. I think that there may have been no room to move. And I guess all the kids old enough and capable enough of having schooling were put in the same room.

 

Early Light

04 Thursday Apr 2013

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Early Light

Early Light

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

This was the problem that the orphanage asked me to to find a solution for.
The orphanage didn’t have much money, relied on volunteers. The kids got a basic education at the orphanage, a pretty old-fashioned one. I think they had one teacher and they had classes five days a week. At the age of 15 they had to leave there.

Some of the kids got adopted, mainly by French couples. For the others the orphanage tried to give them some basic training of some kind and to get them a job.
But no matter what job a child got, it was a hard job with little pay and many hours of labour, and the kids gave up quickly and ran away.

They ended up on the street and things didn’t go well for them. The orphanage wondered if there was something that could be taught about personal responsibility. And something that could motivate them.

That was in 2005. I’ve been thinking about that for eight years now. Maybe they’ve found a solution, or maybe they’ve forgotten the problem. Anyway, so far I haven’t been able to think of anything.

The Cat

01 Monday Apr 2013

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The Cat

The Cat

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

This is a little story about moving.

I moved to a town for the third time. And for the third time I did not bring a cat with me, though the second time I took one. I thought I would go back for him, but now he is in another place that I left him, and he is dying.

He has cat cancer. I should have gone for him a long time ago but I didn’t have the resources to do that. I got an email asking me to go to him, but I didn’t have the resources to do that either.

It was a long time that I knew him; he is maybe nineteen years old now. This is the town that he was born. Did he want to be here when he died? Would he have preferred to be with me when he died? I don’t think that he would have cared.

Somebody picked him and his brother up off the river bank, down south in the town, when they were very small. If you go down to that particular part of the river bank you’ll find cats that look just like him. If I were free to behave in the way I would like to behave, then I would be going down to that part of the river bank looking for another kitten, or possibly two more kittens, to bring home, that’s what I think the moment of him dying means. But I am no more free to do that than I was to jump on a plane and fly to his deathbed.

There is an orphanage in Vietnam, that I visited once, that I made a promise to; to try to come up with a solution to a problem they had. It is a promise I haven’t been able to keep as yet because I haven’t figured out what the solution could be and I don’t want to give them a solution that doesn’t work.

And there are one or possibly two kittens on a riverbank just south of the centre of this town to whom I feel I have an obligation.

These are my most important obligations, at the moment, though I may never manage to fulfil them. They are not important for any particular reason. I think that I should have much more significant obligations as my main obligations, if I am going to have any. But I don’t. One is a promise that I thought was important, and the other is my grief, which I have suspended temporarily.