good bye 2 u

Sliding away

If you come to our school in the summer, you will be able to see in our two hanging gardens red roses, banana trees and six big pots of water lilies and lotuses. The gardens, designed by our former principal, were intended to be a place for students and teachers to take a stroll, relax, chit chat or train solo verse speakers.

Three years ago, a young principal came to replace our nature loving principal who reached sixty. As the new one had never been a principal before, he was careful in taking measures not to put himself in any traps that might jeopardize his career. And one such move was to lock the Lily Pond Garden and the Hanging Garden up so he would not have to bear any responsibility if any students jump off from the place which he found out, was not insured.

Ever after the two metal gates were installed and locked, students and teachers stopped frequenting the gardens; our Vice Principal stopped his Tai Chi practice there too.

But the lilies keep on blooming, luring me to go to smell them and take pictures of them. So, here I am, over the fence.

Happy place, happy time!

Wsc is a place filled with lots of sweet memory, sweat, tears and laughter

My wedding photo now hanging above our bed was taken there,

Still hanging outside the staff room is a photo showing forty happy F.1 & 2 students cheering with their trophies and pennants after beating other school teams in the choral verse speaking event.

Yes, year after year, we entered to compete in the mixed voice choral verse speaking and year after year, we clinched the first. One year, we were saying the poem “Little Green Apples” and there were twenty three school teams. After reciting our poem, we stayed to listen to other schools to do poem (b) and you can’t imagine how happy we all were when we heard the adjudicator announce the good news.

We lost some too. One year, we did not have enough people going and another team pointed out we only had 19 students when we should have at least 30 to be qualified. So, the adjudicator rubbed out the ‘First” on our score sheet and the girls came back crying.

We chanted, we danced, we sweated & we cried here once. But never more!