Free Radio Belly by Buffy Cram Page A

road, watching instead a small black-and-white TV wedged between the dashboard and window—old reruns of the same medical drama your father likes so much, the one where people are always making speeches over open bodies. The subtitles take up half the screen. This isn’t much of a welcoming but you’re too tired to be offended. There will be plenty of time to explain about handshakes and hugs, about receiving a home-cooked meal after a long flight.
    The men carry your bags into your hut and leave. It is nothing like the picture the recruiter sent you. It has the ambience of a shed—a single room with a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a thin sliding metal door and concrete floors that slope toward a drain in the middle. When you shower, the water fans out across the floor. You have to run around swearing and dripping, dragging luggage to higher ground. That’s when the note you scribbled earlier flutters out of your purse— Embrace the exotic! it says. You stick it to the wall above your bed, but it’s already irrelevant. Already it seems written by another type of person.
    The next morning you discover the school is nothing like its photo either. This school is smaller, less reliable looking. Every wall and window is plastered over with rusty old tin signage salvaged from the nearest city. The whole building seems to flap in the wind like a prehistoric bird. You are met by the principal, Mr. Bruce, a short, brisk man dressed for some reason like an Oxford don. He leads you up a long flight of stairs. Inside, the school is like a cave, hardly a sliver of daylight available. Each classroom has bare walls and a window looking onto the hallway. You and Mr. Bruce stop to peer into classes 1A, 1B and 1C. You are just about to suggest more imaginative names, something the students can identify with—dolphins or tigers—when a teacher slaps a ruler across her desk to call the class to attention. The students scurry like sand crabs, tucking limbs under desks. Mr. Bruce folds his hands behind his back and rocks forward onto his toes, looking pleased. As you move down the hall, you notice that the teachers are all women, all from this part of the world. None of them are teaching English in English, and for some reason all of the teachers and female students are wearing cloth masks over their noses and mouths.
    You catch Mr. Bruce by the leather patch on his elbow. “Why do they wear these masks?”
    He pauses, throws his head back, as if searching the ceiling of his mind. Then he nods and says, “Priacy,” stabbing down with his chin.
    You squint at his mouth. It’s as if his face is too tight or his tongue is too short to speak clearly.
    â€œOh, priv acy!” you say at last. But something must’ve been lost in translation. Clearly there is either a health concern or this is some form of female oppression. You can’t imagine how wearing a tiny little mask offers a person any privacy.
    IN HIS SMALL brown office, Mr. Bruce sits on the other side of his desk, beneath a framed poster of Bruce Lee, and explains that you will be given the school’s “number one, top-prize class,” the twelve oldest students who are closing in on the “X Test.” He explains how long the students have been preparing, how far they must walk to class, how devastated they were when the last teacher quit just four months before the test, but you know all this because the recruiter prepped you. You also know Mr. Bruce means “exit test,” a standardized exam divided into the areas of Speech and Writing, Vocabulary and Grammar—you have been brought in for Speech. You are the only native-speaking English teacher in the whole country, Mr. Bruce says, so your students have a great advantage. There appears to be a problem though, changes made to the testing format. It’s all very troubling to Mr. Bruce, who is now spitting and shouting.
    â€œX Test is eye of