Ups and Downs

These past few days have been quite a roller-coaster of emotions and events.
First, the students have arrived back on campus and it's very exciting to see them and wonder who will be my students. You can see the excitement on their faces and feel it in the air. They're moving into their dorms and doing a lot of orientation sessions this week to familiarize them with the new curriculum. It's fun to see them in the stairway--they all say "good morning ma'am" and "hello professor". I attended a session yesterday where a few of them gave brief presentations on their summer internships. They all seemed to have had really interesting experiences and they all said their respective places of employment were very impressed that they were only first-year undergrads. Most people don't do internships until the last year of undergrad or even after they've graduated.
Second, more upheaval has occurred with staff firings and there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding what the future of the faculty employment is, what the chain of command really is and where we can direct students if they have issues beyond just their classwork. It's a very fine line to tread because it seems all of the former staff or faculty that tried to help the students or advocate for them have been fired, so not only are the students very wary of the administration (both because it's constantly changing and also because they seem to remove their day-to-day educators who know them well) but the staff and faculty are very wary for fear we'll be out of a job for being leaders. The ironic part is we keep saying we want to "educate future leaders" and it seems the students and faculty don't have the ability to even lead within their own University.
On top of all this, I've been doing a lot of work on a publication from my postdoc and I have to do that very early in the morning or very late at night when the internet works better (the entire university shares only so much bandwidth--its VERY expensive here and most universities don't really even have computers or internet for the students until their final year), so I haven't been sleeping much. Anyone who knows me very well knows I need a lot of good, regular sleep to function properly, so hopefully I can catch up on some this weekend....
I'm sure when classes start a week and a half from now it will be easier to get on a regular schedule.
So, as the title of this post alludes to, I've been seeing students and finalizing my class materials and getting very excited and at the same time seeing a lot of dysfunction and struggling with how to overcome it all. One other "up" is that I found the one place in all of Chittagong to buy beer, so that's a relief to come home and have a cold one waiting in the fridge. (you can go to a couple hotels to get some, but this is sort of a liquor store). There's only one kind of beer here--the can looks exactly like Foster's, but it's called Hunter. It's 100 taka per can (~$1.50) a can if you buy one can or a case, so it's not cheap and it tastes like bad Corona, so a lime really helps.....