Greve.

I had so many words floating around in my head over what to title this post, but the one I chose seemed to me to be the most appropriate. Greve in Portuguese means ``Strike,´´ the kind that happens when peoples rights are abused not like all you baseball fans were thinking. (Sorry to get your hopes up.) This word has kind of been the theme to my week and has hardly been off the lips of any person in Viseu, let alone Portugal for that matter, for the past while. Before I go into detail about the issues under scrutiny or my opinions on them I´ll tell you a little bit about my week. For starters this week has all been really rainy and dark, I guess you could say dank but in the literal sense. Gloomy. This hasn´t really helped anyones attitudes towards anything let alone the Greve. The cold wind and rain has kept most of us homebound and has even pushed Afonso to sickness. I´m always doing my best to stay healthy and I hope none of my Oregon toughness (cough cough) has worn off yet. Like you know if you read my last post I didn´t have school on Monday due to a holiday, Tuesday was normal and I only had two classes. That was the day of the whole visa shinanigans. I woke up wednesday morning to the incessant buzzing of my alarm clock and climbed out of bed in the darkness that stays with us even until 7:30 a.m. I was expecting nothing less (or more) than a normal day at school that morning as I ate breakfast and started my commute (A.K.A. The ten-minute freezing morning hell dash to school.) I´m just kidding it´s not that bad. (But still cold.) When I arrived at school I found the parking lot looking surprisingly empty and the classrooms strangely dark. The main gate of the school was still open though, so I went on ahead and entered. When I found the classroom in which my first lesson was to be held I encountered a small group of students and asked what was going on. They said today all the teachers would be going on strike to counter the Ministry. Our teacher however, was not on strike and would be coming to class. Well he did, class was fine and the final bell rang as normal; little did I know that this was the end of what was left of the normality of my week. I went to the room where my next class was to be held and upon arrival finding no one, I went to go look for some answers. I ventured down to the school bar where I met some of the other kids from my term and asked what was going on. They said that apparently all of our teachers were in support of the strike and that school was over for us today. So all my friends were planing to just hang out down in the school for the rest of the day until the buses came to take them home. I headed home myself and then back to school and then home again just kind of passing in this onslaught of confusion that was plagueing everyone affliliated with our school. During one of my passes I noticed a poster, or a canvas rather, covered in spraypaint displaying all sorts of things about the Ministry and how bad it is and that tommorow (today, the 4th of December) we students were going to do something about it! And how you might ask? The letters G.R.E.V.E. were painted in big, bright red at the bottom. When I saw this I had mixed emotions. Maybe now is a good time to explain the situation. The teachers are protesting because they feel they are being ``Militarized´´ by the Ministry, I.E. stricter regulations, schedules, testes etc. I guess kind of like N.C.L.B. and they feel like they need to be left alone, teach what they want, and get paid more. Of course this has recieved a lot of the media´s attention and when various student groups from around the country gave their support to the teachers they (the students) were given a lot of attention as well. The students have been feeling the pressure of the Ministry´s rule for a long time, and, riding this new wave of publicity and unrest they are doing things they would never have done before. GREVE! Sure protesting is the easiest and most fun way of getting your point across, (I mean what teenage student is gonna turn down ditching school for a day and causing chaos in the streets, the romanticity and rebelious attitude behind idea of anarchy is an appealing one.) but the sacrifice your going to make is looking like an idiot and that´s not worth risking. It can also be said that teens have organizational problems, besides keeping rooms clean, and this (rioting) is easier than putting in the effort to organize and really effectively inspire change. I personally think that we (students) have much more power than we realize, after all we are the future of the world wether we or anyone else likes it or not. There are much more realistic threats or comprimises that could be made instead of refusing our education. How do we expect to make things better if we can´t write laws to change them etc.? I think we have to show how smart we really are in ways that don´t prove the opposite, otherwise we will be labeled hypocrites and never taken seriously. This remindes me of a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche ``Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.´´
The students basically have three main points that frankly are right (or wrong) enough to deserve some serious attention and tweakage, and they used this strike and media coverage to get that attention. I think an all out strike is not the right way to come about change, but I´ll get to that later. Anyway, the three points of the students are as follows: 1. End this regime of faults. A fault is like an absence but you can fault if you don´t have the materials neccessary for class, if you are more than 10 min. late or if you just don´t come. These are are equal in the eye of the ministry. 2. How free is public school when each student is required to pay over 35 euros for each textbook in each class. and 3. Us students just work to damn hard for you, school is hard and it should be easier and WAH WAH WAH. (one of the points I don´t agree with.) One of the main arguments the students have been making is that they are not manipulated and that they are smart. One thing that makes me sick is just how cool they all think they are. They make these big old spray-painted banners, block of the school gates not letting in teachers or staff members (the whole time it´s raining and freezing cold), yelling, screaming and chanting all these things. And that´s not even the beginning. So that´s just were I´ll start. I woke up early again this morning, more tired than yesterday, dressed and prepared for school. I knew the strike would be happening but I thought that since it was only a STUDENT strike I could still go to class as I had no intention of participating in the hell-raising. When I got to school the scene was much as it was the day before, empty parking lot, dark windows, gloom.Dank. Now, when I come to school the way I walk from my house puts me in the back of the school, far off the main street. I can usually just pop in a side gate and head straight to class or to the social areas or whatever. Like yesterday the back gate was locked so I made my way up to the front of the school. When I got there I was greeted by a literal mob of well over a thousand students chanting, screaming and generally being like the steriotypical protest. There were signs, megafones and, the main attraction of the show, the media. The students I think succeeded in other areas than making fools of themselves, they used their own desire, the media, to document them making fools of themselves. There were media personnel all over this juicy student rebellion and they didn´t hesitate to go so far as to climb up on walls to get a good angle. (This just made everyone more excited and led to a sort of symbiotic relationship,if you will, with the media.) I quickly found my classmates and we got down to business; which was doing exactly the opposite: nothing.(So smart.) We hung out there watching the cars pass on the streets, the people inside showing looks of anything from support or unintrest, to disgust or to even documenting the event with digital cameras and cell phones. Ahh, technology. Every so often the crowd would start surging and the yells would become louder, whistles would blow and all the reporters would run with their cameras at the ready to see what was happening this time. If you´ve ever been to Halloween or New Years (or any holiday worth getting drunk over) on the Plaza in downtown Ashland you can picture it a lot like that, whenever a lightsaber is raised, a countdown started, the cops drive by, or someone stumbles and finds themselves at the top of the drinking fountain a huge roar of un-comprehensible noise raises from the crowd. As I talked with more people and began to try and educate myself about this manifestation I quickly realized that probably 90% of all the people there didn´t know exactly why they were. Most of the people new it was a demonstration/protest for something(props on figuring out that brainbuster) let alone that it was student lead. Those who did know a little about the motives of the deal only knew the three sentences written all around them on the big spray-painted banners and that they were here to fight the ministry and for their rights as students and people too! One thing I do know now is that 100% of those people were rightly stoked to have a day off of school! The more I tried talking with people and debating ideas about our soon to become riot, the more I was shut out. Just before I was going to go home to do some research and get some answers something changed. A group of students was standing there with big signs spelling out the word ROSSIO, which is the center of town. That´s when the avalanche started. People started fooding through the city park that divides our school campus from downtown and pooling up in front of the city hall. Traffic screached to a stop as the river of angry students washed by churning and spitting as if the threat of being run over wasn´t an object. I followed reluctantly seeing that there was no way I could get in to school. I actually took a quick break and got a snack too, a lancheira. I think other people had the same idea at this time but instead went to buy beer, eggs and ciggarettes. (all leagal and all perfectly appropriate to help the student cause!) When I got back the now riot was moving towards the other section of the city hall up across the street. This other new city hall building doesn´t have a plaza in front of it, so the mass simply halted in the street outside. Once again traffic came, with screaching brakes and near misses, to a halt. This is when the Police came. At first they were just there to aid in the flow of traffic around the nearly 2,000 strong body of students but then decided to bring in a van force to keep things under control. The street was blocked off and the students were trapped with a whole street to themselves. Aided by beer and ciggaretes the fuming student machine began drawing more attention than ever before, with a final blow eggs were sent soaring at the windows and white washed walls of the city hall. Of course the Police didn´t like this and didn´t let it last long. Like a bunch of ashes after a fireworks display the students started to disperse and blow away. I too returned home and saw that our actions had truly not gone unnoticed and that the national news T.V. station was already broadcasting the story for everyone to see. (Or laught at.) Well, I think that´s all I have about that. I think we´re lucky in the stats, or maybe just in Ashland, to have such dedicated teachers and such rational, smart students. (o.k. maybe just in Ashland.) Thanks, and any questions or comments would help fill in some of the blanks here (for me and you!), clarify and all that. Até Já.