The wind was my boss
Six months to never forget
*The names have been changed to protect the privacy of the characters of this story.
Out of any weird employer, I once worked for the wind. Those were amongst the weirdest and darkest months of my existence. I discovered a world I had never thought would be possible before, and I was a mute spectator before the discrimination, exclusion and manipulation of people and their sincere beliefs.
You might be thinking that the wind cannot act by itself and you are right. So, it had a medium: my actual boss. Maurice threw himself off of a tenth floor in his youth, due to personal issues and, after that, he has been able to hear the wind. The issue is, the wind was a lot less gentle than we usually concede it. It is very nice to refresh you on a hot day or to clear the air of a room, but it is a perverse patron.
It commanded a family/company, run a very successful business and the most unorthodox school I have ever been to. I lived one of the weirdest and saddest episodes of my life in the premises of what, at first sight, seemed like a piece of heaven.
The truth
When Maurice Tonyo was young, he resolved his life would be devoted to engineering. But, per his own quest for the truth, he never paid too much attention to that. Tonyo quit studying engineering for two very powerful reasons. The first, it was not his true calling. He wanted to have an unconventional profession these days: he wished to be a prophet. The second reason is that he was interested in architecture, from which his wealth stemmed later.
He came forth clear with his peculiar ideas and actions right in the job interview, as I would be exposed to them:
I need to tell you something: (awkward pause) We are polygamous.
I failed to fake any surprise looking him at his piercing blue eyes because I had been warned and because I am an anthropologist. I had read about polygamy, about all the males in one family sharing one sexual partner, about levirate and sororate, feminine husbands in some places and a diverse etcetera. I actually thought it would be more interesting than it was in that sense. It was a sort of working agreement between them, they tended to behave as a company/family at the same time. It was complex and unseen, but I definitely did not encountered anything interesting happening between them. I became interested in the position when it was offered to me because of the polygamy portion and I was eager to meet and interact with them to understand. I also had in mind, since the beginning, that I would write and publish one or more pieces on them. It is a very infrequent situation and they, particularly, make a good case study.
Then, Tonyo went on to his substance use. Marijuana, LSD and fungi were his ways to seek the truth. He claimed not to do it recreationally, but with the explicit intention of seeking the truth. Not a truth, but the truth. One eternal, immutable and transmissible truth to found his movement on. He was looking for the type of truth the Ancient Greeks used to express with the gnomic aorist.
Hailsham & Co.
Hailsham was built on his truth. I am borrowing the name because, when I read Never let me go, while being an English teacher there, it struck a chord. The resemblance of my workplace to a dystopia book written by then-recently awarded Kazuo Ishiguro was truly shocking. I was playing a part of a heinous machine to produce a particular type of human being with which I was not in agreement. It was against everything I believe in.
Yet, I took the job because I was then jobless and it was in the only area I had experience: teaching. I had been an assistant professor and member of a research center at my University. Plus, it was teaching languages and history: English, French, Latin and World History. That was the last element that convinced me: I had desired to teach languages at some point in my life and here I had a well paid chance. I thought I would never in my life have an opportunity to teach Latin and this one was offered to me, I just had to stretch my hand and take it. I did.
So, the first day I stepped in Hailsham, I was surprised by the crisp air of the mountain where it is located, the emptiness I felt even though it was full of people — out of my sight and reach — and the dark sensation down my spine. I sat quietly in the circular central chimney waiting for someone called Donna, Maurice’s step-daughter. I was quite surprised she was near my age (25 at the time) and was basically coordinating the institution. She showed me around and asked me to deliver my test class.
She took me to the seniors course and the teacher I was about to replace told me he was working on Egyptian history for a trip they were planning, so I did something in that line. That same Thursday of June, while I was having fun, I received a message telling me I had been accepted and that I needed to go the following day to provide my documents. By next Tuesday, I was their new languages and history teacher.
I had time to get amazed by the school itself while working there. The building is very well designed and built, with a distribution of spaces that I enjoyed; it allowed for different areas, with enough separation to conduct the many types of activities a school carries on every day without interrupting each other. I have three pictures I took that July, in the only day of student recess I was left alone in the premises. I knew I would not have that chance a second time and that, by next July, I would not be there. I, also, knew that this place was worthy of photographing and being one of my passions, I took a couple of pictures of the empty school yard and building.
That geometry was a direct result of Maurice’s religious/spiritual ideas. It had a certain symmetry and distribution of spaces to align to his vision of spirituality and morality. And there was a spatial limitation that fostered a good learning environment, but was misused, as many resources. The number seven is key to their theology. So, there could not be more than seven people in a single classroom: six students and one teacher.
Fertile ground
The school was the center of diffusion of Maurice Tonyo’s ideas. But he was not going to tell to his large progeny what he told the teachers about his past life and how did he get where he is. So, there were special classes he taught to his children, always on Thursdays, at a fixed time. Then, he would proceed to a meeting with teachers or to a lunch with us. I heard many insights from his own words, about how the world, life, family and education should be.
We had three items strictly forbidden for class talk: politics, gender/sexuality issues and religion. I got a warning since the beginning, given I had worked as a volunteer for a trans rights advocacy group and I cited that experience in my resume. One important reason I decided to become an anthropologist was to understand why LGBTQ sexualities and gender identities are marginalized and persecuted in our societies. I am genuinely interested in understanding and educating people who want to know about those issues.
I have devoted a good amount of time to read, to familiarize with theory and to be part of the group I mentioned, so I could have a well-rounded idea of how human gender and sexuality work and intertwine with political, economic and social structures. When I do, I speak from a professional perspective, with my analytical framework in mind, I will not go on about my own experiences for other people’s entertainment.
That was not a good answer to the question about how to handle the issue if they ever asked. So, shut up and nod was their formula. I shut up and nodded, but I knew that decision would be emotionally taxing for me during my time there, as it was. I have some difficulty in avoiding issues that interest me, specially because those are subjects that do not harm anybody. Discussing an important part of the human experience and how it affects our lives has not and will not kill anyone, but it can give hope to someone silently struggling with themselves, precisely in arepressive environment like that.
Everything the Tonyo family did and thought had to be guided by one all-encompassing quest: to lift the veil. The veil that hides the truth, which he never explained in detail what consisted of. But there is yet something more concerning about truth and veil-lifting: the truth hides behind death. I had reasons to think I had just joined a suicidal cult and that they could poison us any day, because we were given all of the food we needed while there, every school day. I worked with a friend of mine and we both had our low-key anxiety about it. He dissipated our fears on my birthday, in which there was a meeting at his home. He said we have all the life to prepare for death, when it comes, there was no need to accelerate one’s own demise.
The meetings at his home were one of two types: the educational ones, held at school every Thursday and the theological ones, held at his private house. Once a month, on a Friday, we would sit and hear him explaining his doctrine. Then, he would prompt discussion and we would exchange ideas as if it was an actual church or religious study meeting. The first time I actually heard an articulated discourse on his ideas, I could do nothing more than laugh loudly. I could not restrain myself, I was having too much craze in so little time. Having truth hidden behind death and one whole life to prepare for the encounter with the truth, while at the same time listening to the wind to tell you what to do and trying to lift a mysterious veil that hides an immortal truth from our eyes does not seem like the type of endeavor I enjoy or, at least, find sound and logical.
But I was, although unwillingly, becoming a part of the diffusion machine of his ideas. I suddenly went from working as a researcher to being a pitiful herald of someone’s truth. A truth plagued with misogyny, LGBT-phobia and a general intolerance for whatever was different from his beliefs.
Educational issues
I was not ready for any of them. I was not ready to face kids raised in an environment so different than mine, with so complex ideas and behaviors. I come from a middle class family in a town of my country. Thanks to my academic prowess, I obtained a scholarship to one of the top Universities, in the capital city, where some relatives lived and that is how I became a foreign affairs and anthropology graduate. I was unprepared for their behavior regarding their academic process, their lives, their attitudes towards life, the relationship to other people.
They were better friends than they were students. I really liked when we could spend time being ourselves, not teacher and students. But when I had to be the teacher, problems arose. They almost never wanted to do their required activities, they wanted to chat in the classroom, to use Snapchat, to watch videos, to wander around the school. One of the youngest kids used to escape the classroom through the window. Yes,the window. At the beginning, I used to get out of the classroom (by the door) to take him back. I was concerned for that behavior, until I no more was, I became used to it at some point. I actually stopped teaching him altogether and I do not feel bad about it.
I sincerely tried for him to learn, to do the activities, to enjoy the process, to see the advantages of learning what I tried to teach. But while I could motivate the rest of them to some point, I miserably failed with him. Add the pressure of Tonyo’s second wife, Jolene, the academic coordinator for every child to have an 80 in every subject and there you have it. In the beginning, I thought Jo was requesting us to be strict and to have them work hard to attain good grades, but she was actually only implying that we should give them 80, even if they did not deserve it. So, I once more obeyed and gave him what his kind-of-mother wanted.
There is not one single cause I can pinpoint for their behavior. It was a mixture of apathy, lack of specific knowledge they should have and very obviously did not, plus a sincere belief that what I was teaching would not serve them in the future. So, there was no point in making the effort. To me, very short-sighted for their age, but an expectable result of growing up in a symbolically violent environment, in which there was a clear and visible disdain for certain parts of the human experience. The adults drew bold lines, where human variation and diversity say there are diffuse ones, if some.
The system Mr. Tonyo envisioned was very similar to any American school. The school did not have actual legal existence in our country, but was backed by an American homeschooling institution, recognized by a State Board of Education. Their plans had a division of weeks, with subjects and activities. That is where good adaptation vanished. As soon as I tried to apply my plans with the students, I faced a concrete wall of indifference and lack of knowledge for their educational level and alleged background.
They were absolutely not interested in what I had to teach them. And I did not even had to actually teach. They were supposed to work on their own, which worsened the matter, as I did not have any real power to have them do what they were supposed, more than trying to convince them to do it. Although I do not believe in discipline enforced by violence, I do think they were too far at the other extreme, in which there was no discipline to perform their tasks. They were very smart, but their usual ways did not allow them to develop their full potential. That is one of the sad parts of this journey: very brilliant, kind and warm kids who could do wonders for themselves if they had the discipline and motivation to achieve what they dreamed of.
The oldest kids could write University-level essays when they duly applied themselves to their labor. They once submitted great essays on our country’s armed conflict and I could tell because, before that, I had been assistant professor and researcher at the same University where I studied. They were sitting at an uncomfortable and uncertain crossroad, in which I was as well.
We live in a time where the traditional educational system of the 19th century, destined to produce factory workers is falling behind the movement of the world. What traditional school teaches and the ways it does do not always align with what the world requires. Even though I did well in school, I have lived of what I studied and I am a few months away of starting my master, I do recognize I got bored sometimes when I was younger and I, as well, thought some of my teachers and professors were teaching me useless information. I always found purposeless the use of uniforms, the excessive length of classes, the rigid schedules, while neither life nor work function in that exact manner. In time, when societies started regimenting their lives based on the clock rather than on natural or body cycles, we started having a different conscience of time and to use it differently.
Thus, in 19th century industrial Britain, it made sense to have workers sit tightly in their spots to produce the factory goods they were employed to make. A certain pace meant a certain stable income for the factory and there was an average time to produce or assemble each piece or unit. Any second wasted beyond that limit meant economic losses for the factory. Some additional 2 minutes per item per person per day beyond the required time in a factory could mean an important loss of income.
But we live in a profoundly different world and some educational structures have started to change, yet there is one key problem keeping regular schools and Universities behind: the world changes faster than the highly regulated educational systems allow.
Now, having said that, and relating my education to my working experience, I have long believed anthropology is not a profession you can switch on and off when you enter and leave the job you do. Whatever your actual occupation is, you have an acute eye for details that might go unnoticed, but reveal who people are and what they honestly think, rather than what they tell. I took my time to read essays and assignments not only to ascertain the quality of the piece, but also the person behind it. The questions I used — most of them not mine, but from the textbook I was given to support my own research and class activities — usually requested taking position in complex contemporary issues and they most usually revealed sincere positions in real life. When questioned, they opened up a lot more and explained and justified their assertions.
I would have been cheerful to say that all the answers and essays I read were brilliant and made me happy. They were not. Most of their answers were indeed brilliant, but the less shiny ones were stained of hard gender and racial prejudices drawn from their actual lives and brought to the social studies subjects we were discussing. It also makes me wonder if that is the reason the social studies/languages teacher at the school is the one with the highest rotation of personnel. That teacher is to question student’s lives, as we are social beings who can reflect on ourselves. My careers belong to the real, factual world we live in. The thinker must also think about him/her/themselves and put that in words, in a debatable fashion.
The people behind the students were, to a point, a reflection of mr. Tonyo and his partners: of their upbringing, their circumstances, their socio-economic status and their life choices, which affected the kid’s in turn. What they became revealed where they came from and what they were developing to be did not seem exactly a nice picture for me. The only thing that gave me solace was to know that some of the eldest children, the ones from mr. Tonyo’s marriage had families of their own and they seemed not to be like their family of origin and rather regular families, with people working and studying in regular settings. That is the second part of this trip, when the wind whispered “family”.
