Friday, March 27, 2009

C'mon Baby Light My..Basement?

Two days ago a random stranger decided to smoke a cigarette near the entrance to the garage that is in the bottom of the building I teach at.  The smoker, I assume, once finished, then discarded their cigarette in a probably absent minded manner and, also assuming on my part, guess that the cigarette rolled down the ramp leading into the garage and then found a nameless puddle of oil.  This cigarette then caused the puddle of oil to erupt into flame.  This lead to the garage being set on fire.  This fire then raged throughout the garage and was put out by firemen.  The firemen used lots of water to put it out and apparently this event was witnessed by some and broadcast over the news to others.

This happened late Thursday night.

Friday morning I got up, did my exercises, made some breakfast, wrote a weeks worth of daily reviews for my Kindergartner's parents while listening to Casey Driessen, and moseyed my way towards the school across the highway.    The building looked normal enough and when I got to the coffee shop on the first floor with it's entrance on the left side I noticed that an older woman was beating out cushions with a broom with the door wide open.  I went in and thought, wow, there's a rather strong musk here isn't there?  Probably the sewage coming up the pipes again, as they're known to do here.  The lady who owns the shop, Rem, saw me and instead of her normal exuberance looked like an animal caught in the headlights.  She seemed torn between wanting to help me and wanting to tell me the shop is closed.  All of this I had to infer though as she speaks barely a word of English.  

"Would you like me to leave?  Is everything okay?" I said.  She starts ranting in Korean much faster than normal and the only thing I could pick up was pul which I know means fire.  "Pul?" I ask, motioning around the shop and looking, not noticing any scorch marks anywhere.  "Like, pul pul?  Here?"  She nods her head up and down faster pointing to the ground and then ramps up into something with the words pul and base-ah-ment-ee being all I catch.  (When English words are used here they get an EE sound at the end.  It's not a mart, it's a mart-ee, and cheese is cheese-ee.  You get the idea.)  Once I opened the door leading from her shop to the lobby I saw what she meant.

The normally white walls were covered in black.  There was a waterfall of nasty water pouring down the staircase to my left.  The stone floor was a mess of soot and puddles.  The smell was pungent and the taste of the smoke still hung in air.  At this moment I heard the kids leaving a schoolbus come running up the hallway towards the elevator.  They ran into one another once reaching the lobby and we all stared around in astonishment; they at seeing what a fire can do and me knowing that there was no way the school was going to cancel today- fire or not.

Once I made it to the sixth floor and walked into the school I saw the smoke had made it into the office and classrooms and covered everything with a thin film.  It was here I was informed about the oil fire and the cigarette.  Walking around I saw that the brightly colored playing blocks were blackish with soot, the walls were greyish, the floor was blackish, the books were filmed.  My room was luckily less grey than others since I had closed my windows the end of the schoolday before but the ones that had central heating vents in their rooms or had left their windows open were a complete mess.  CD players were ruined.  The hallways and walls were filthy.  The play gyms and big gyms were filthy.  The place smelled horrible.  Despite all this though we knew we had to work in it no matter what.  The same country that wears surgical masks to go running and thinks drying your clothes in the sunlight is healthier was going to have a school day with hundreds of children and staff breathing in soot and mold.  Amazing.

So the morning was myself and my supervisor wiping down the walls and science kits and windows while the kinders did their own baskets and tried not to touch their faces with most failing miserably and scores of children running around looking like chimney-sweepers.  On top of this it was Eileen's, one of my kinders, birthday!  At 11:15am they brought in her birthday cake and we had her birthday party while the cleaning staff was taking a mop to the play mat in our room trying to make it look less black than before in hopes the kids can sit on it again.  We opened presents with an old Korean woman scrubbing the windows behind the children with a filthy wet rag that must have been used on all the classrooms before mine.  They had treats and tangerines and juice drinks and celebrated her birthday in a soot-smelling room with soot on each other's faces and white clothes.  On top of it all, Eileen is the poet of the group.  She has the most mature sense of self and artistic bent out of all the children, that these were the circumstances of her birthday party seemed strangely appropriate to me in some macabre way. 

The fire had been in the garage but the smoke had traveled throughout the building.  I felt lucky that the sprinklers had not gone off on our floor since that would have to have necessitated in the school being shut down for repairs, or at the worst, me losing my job because of the expense.  On the sixth floor from a garage fire, the smoke damage was this bad.  I can only imagine the closer floors.  So remember kids, smokers of all things green and brown, when you're done with your butt, PUT IT OUT.  Flicking it away is not cool and can almost lead to ruining a girl's birthday party!  This has been a public service announcement from the Council On Uncool Affairs.  

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