Younger Days

Her name is Josephina. She is five years old but thinks she is six. She is missing a front tooth in a row of her tiny baby teeth that, when she laughs, give you the same feeling in your chest as the soft inside of a puppy’s ear flopped up when it sleeps.  A squeeze on your heart as if it were a little ball of foam. She does not speak a word of English, except “teacha”, “toilet” and the universal language of a child’s many facial expressions. And as those go, hers are nothing less than exquisite. She tries hard in class, talking to herself in a hushed voice in Swahili as she diligently copies English words from the board that she doesn’t understand. When she gets tired, one eyelid will droop to almost close and she will sway in the effort of keeping her little head upright while. Her hair is always braided neatly into fuzzy little braids, the tiny tails of which all end in a little flower shape at the back of her head. She has exema or some other kind of skin condition that keep her little fingers in a constant state of roughness and peeling layers of skin. When she is nervous, she tucks her tiny chin in her chest and covers her mouth with her hands, looking up at you with huge center less lemur eyes. When she cries, she merely sniffs quietly and tucks her head away - a sight that could very well kill you on the spot from a weak heart. She does not misbehave often but when she does she responds to your reprimand immediately and sheepishly. Sometimes she is sick at school. And then you will find her lying in the sand outside and she will not come into class when called, an out of character behavior for the little miss Josephina who usually comes bounding in. You cant understand her almost inaudible complaints but she never wants to go home. In Africa, the lines between daily life, sickness and death are thin and skated across without remark. And so you watch her like a hawk but don’t have any cards to play in her favor, because in Africa someone else holds nearly the whole deck and most definitely all the aces. And that person you most likely wont meet again until you’ve played and lost. But the next day she is once again running to meet you  at the gate with arms outstretched and that heart-attacking smile in full beam. To know her, this Josephina, is to wring every drop from your heart loving her and not even wonder if she will remember you when you are gone as she moves precariously toward African adulthood.

His name is MickDadi. Not kidding. That is his name. He is arguable one of the smartest kids in class and one of the most disruptive - isn’t that always how it works. Disciplining him, or trying to, is more tiring than chasing bunnies around a meadow. Getting him to do his work is one thing, but keeping him busy after he finishes with perfect scores and gets to climbing up the shelves and sending supplies crashing down is another. When the new primary school teacher came to teach the other class, he gave MickDadi a talking to in soft but curt Kiswahili. And after that MickDadi came up to all the teachers, pulling our arms saying “I’m solly teacha, I’m solly”. Don’t get to thinking that the chat turned his collar up or made him vanilla. The next day we caught him hoarding crayons under his butt and chasing the other kids with a massive, heavy stick. We are not sure why he does what he does. But when one of the more popular kids stayed behind in class crying because we made him finish his work, MickDadi stayed  back with him, tugging at his arm, stroking his face and soothing him in Swahili. After the kid stopped crying and rejoined his friends in line, he was back to excluding and swiping at MickDadi, who sits at his own table in class alone. We have to put MickDadi in time out a lot. Sometimes its for not doing his work, sometimes for grabbing supplies without asking, sometimes for hitting other kids. Sometimes he does it for attention, sometimes out of boredom, sometimes out of his feeling of exclusion, and who knows why else. A smarter six year old, you will be hard pressed to find all across the world. We wonder what he will grow up to be. Which of his qualities - stubborn, sweet, obstinate, sensitive, sore, or smart- will follow him to adulthood and how they will define his life. When you are a teacher, you can’t separate that long list of qualities into good or bad. Not like you can in business when each has a price tag hanging from its ear. Because each one is both innate and herded through life by from those that surround us. To accept some and deny others would be to excommunicate all of humanity. When MickDadi marches over to Abduli and hits him hard, you should scold him. But hopefully you were watching closely and saw the look of loneliness and isolation in his eyes when Abduli refused to be next to him and hold his hand in a game. Look closely at the kids you know; they will show you on their little diorama stage what you are not seeing in the adults you think you do. So whatever your religion or opinion of human life, I think its obvious that once the lunch bell rings, we are all forgiven. Godspeed MickDadi.