It's never easy starting back at work after a long holiday.  As a teacher, a good deal of the worry is based around the following questions: Will I be given a decent timetable? How many year levels will I have to teach? Will my students be nice, or a nightmare?  So with the first of these questions answered by Tuesday morning (not necessarily satisfactorily, but I wasn't about to complain), I wasn't anticipating any more surprises.

I and seventy other foreign teachers endured a meeting chaired by the school director.  We sat through the slide show on the school's history again, and were reminded that when the missionaries first opened our school, they in fact had to pay students to study here, one of those cute little facts about our school – actually, probably the only cute little fact.  Then of course a breakdown of our 'school spirit': honesty, loyalty, responsibility (whatever happened to academic excellence?), and the school motto, which Dr Woranoot read in her painfully halting English – Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  And then, a special paraphrasing followed: 'So, we want… our students to be… overcome by… evil.' Even the fundamentalist Christian next to me giggled into her hand.

An hour or two later, the teachers in my learning stage were handed our classroom keys.  We knew that our classrooms were going to be bad, and so they were.  Tiny, windowless, crumbling rooms with rusty nails jutting out from the walls and a weird smell, no whiteboards and some even lacking blackboards, backing onto a construction site, they were truly horrible.  But, more importantly, after a couple of minutes in this new room of mine, a strange feeling, as though my lungs were compressing.  Jon emerged from his room next door complaining that he suddenly had a terrible headache.  The first word that sprang to my mind was 'asbestos'.

Jon and I went to the pub after work to talk it over.  Perhaps, Jon suggested, we could teach in gas masks?

The next day I got on the internet to do a little research.  I discovered that this highly poisonous substance is not illegal in this country, and in fact Thailand is the world's biggest importer of asbestos, shipping it in from the mines of Botswana, Bangladesh, Bhutan and several other unfortunate countries starting with 'b'.  And, still on the 'b' theme, just about every building in Bangkok has been insulated with the stuff since the 1930s.  As an article in The Nation put it, 'Wherever you are in Bangkok, whether it be a hotel or hospital or school, you can pretty much take it for granted that the building will contain asbestos. No need to panic; just don't drill too many holes in the walls…'

So no cause for alarm then?  In fact, half of the building we were in had been demolished a year ago, and at the beginning of last year the back walls of these classrooms had been torn down with it, the rooms left gaping open over the construction site where the school is building a new 20 storey building to match its other two.  Since then, the back walls had been rebuilt, but the rooms had been left empty for a year.  And now, assigned to us as supposedly usable classrooms.  Scary not just for the students who, granted, would only have to in the classrooms for 4 hours a week, but for us as teachers, who would be in there for 30 or 40.

I explained this to the grade 6 teachers in our learning stage, and though they were slightly aghast, they continued on their way to the classrooms with their boxes of equipment.  I was a little aghast myself; how could they be so defeatist, so spineless? Yes, the boss is scary, but this is kind of important.  'So I take it you don't want to come and talk to the boss with me then?'  I tried talking to more people about it, but you end up feeling like a whiner, and I got the feeling most people either didn't understand or didn't care.  After all, the other learning stages had all been given fabulous classrooms, as usual.

I had a few people on my side, though, and one of them was, fortunately, our new coordinator.  I convinced him to come into the Department Head's office with me, and we went in armed with a few pages on asbestos I had downloaded from the internet.  To my boss's eternal credit, she took the complaint seriously this time, when the subject of health and safety came up, and the reputation of the school – after all the foot and mouth episodes, she could hardly not. 

And the upshot?  We grade 4 & 5 teachers are being moved back to last year's classrooms for the next two weeks, albeit with no tables or chairs, while there is independent asbestos testing in the dodgy rooms.  And, shame, the spineless grade 6 teachers' old rooms have been turned into homerooms for the Thai teachers, which means they will have to spend the next two weeks cursing me while they team teach in the gymnasium. 

In the pub last night, I was giving a couple of friends (Canadian, Australian, Irish, Thai) a rundown of these events and after a little while it struck me that they didn't have the foggiest idea what I was talking about.  'So, uh,' asked the Canadian, 'What exactly is this, uh, asabestios?'

And if the results for this testing come up negative? Dora Mills, Public Enemy #1.