Casualties

The first confirmed American death in the earthquake in Japan was an American English teacher working for the JET Program.

She is described in the article as "passionately dedicated to her students and fascinated by Japanese culture since childhood."

Strangely, I don't think I know a single English teacher who has died in the line of duty. (Maybe that's not the right term, but you know what I mean.)

One English teacher I know was in Phuket during the tsunami there in 2005; he wrote a lengthy blog post about it but I can't find it online anymore, in a quick search. Fortunately he had to wake up early to get an insulin shot, and noticed what was happening, and managed to get himself and his friends up onto the roof.

It was Christmas morning at 6.00am, and I'm absolutely sure that had I been there, I would have been so drunk I would have drowned like a rat.

There's a story in Russia about an early English teacher -- around 2000 -- who died after falling into an open manhole while drunk. I heard different versions of the story -- somebody who claimed to have known him said that he had slid down a hill on ice and fallen into the foundation of a building site, where he got stuck and froze to death.

Given the number of open manholes, neither story is hard to imagine. I partially fell in one myself one night -- only my leg went in, fortunately not at an angle to snap in half. I emerged unscathed from that one.

Man, black eyes and fat lips? I've seen plenty of those, all over the world. Mostly the result of drunken stupidity, but occasionally legitimate street muggings.

I got my lights completely punched out not just once, but twice in a ROW one memorable evening at a crappy nightclub in Russia back in 2008. Strangely not even so much as a lasting headache later -- but two big ugly black eyes for a week.

That was not nearly as painful as the events of my first bar fight, in which my foot was stomped on and swelled up like a pumpkin. I refused to try to take care of it properly, and limped for months.

Then, of course, there was the time the dog bit me, in 2004. At a house party, I let the family dog out, and went out to try to get it back . . . and mistook a street dog for the family dog. This was the result:

This resulted in series of rabies injections, and an unpleasant week of sobriety. The scar has faded, but girls reading my palm occasionally mention it.

There was a particularly scary story about one guy: one of my colleagues found this guy, a teacher from Australia, wandering in a park near his house, covered with blood and delirious. He'd apparently been smashed in the head with something hard enough to crack his skull. He had no memory of it, so nobody knows if it was a mugging or a disagreement.

Scarier than that -- he hadn't signed a contract yet, so the school he worked for refused to pay his medical bills, and his cracked skull prevented him from flying home for medical treatment.

Other than that, we're like the Mafia -- we mostly hurt each other.

One colleague drunkenly tumbled down some stone steps and ended up in the hospital for a week, with a bad concussion. Crazy Bob sprained his wrist one time drunkenly punching me in the back, and ended up with two cracked ribs after some drunken horseplay with another colleague.

Having fun is hard work, you know.