Left, Right, Left

The rains came to our village last night. And it seemed the entire earth cooled under our feet for a few short hours in the early morning. The sun slept in until noon behind an overcast sky and it felt like a huge breath of fresh air. The morning marked two weeks in Africa, and, even walking the path to our full classroom of squirrelly seven year olds, we felt the calm in the cooled air.

We walk the town now with steadier feet. Remembering the turns through the houses on the path home, even at night when the village is in complete moonless darkness. We know the friendly parts of town that always greet us and the kids running up to shake our hands. We know the silent parts of town that simply watch us with serious eyes as we pass. We know the patch of sandy path where the drunks and the gamblers hoot and holler and laugh as we pass, some of them approaching us stumbling and leering but harmless. We pass easily through the narrow market on the way to town, brimming with the hot smell of rotting vegetables and sunning piles of fish and gaurded by the vendors who turn over their produce in their hands over and over to shoo away the hovering cloud of flies all day long. We no longer wake up or cover our mouths at the smell of burning plastic when it wafts  into our window or through our classroom multiple times a day. I even had my first cup of black instant coffee ever - and I drank it like it was the finest champagne I’d ever had. Yeah, I’d say we are getting along nicely --school kids on our arms and friends who come around, all of us together sipping slowly on our lives.

The dogs here all appear to be the same breed, a small, skinny version of a short-haired Shepard of some kind and keeping them as pets is not a usual practice here - dogs make most locals quite nervous. The few restaurants in town sell most of the same stuff - meat kebobs, chicken on the bone, fish soup (broth with a whole fish limply draped into it) and beans and rice. All drinks come in the glass bottle with a napkin to wipe off the lip and they leave you with the bottle cap to keep the flies from falling into your drink. The nights outside are cool, breezy and balmy and we seize them for all their worth with a walk to town, a Tanzanian beer at a dim local thatch hut restaurant under hanging gas lamps or a nice long languid sit out on the front porch watching the massive mango trees shimmy in the dark. After the crucifying sun and hard work with the children during the days, we are reborn at night, swinging through the hours slowly and carelessly before turning in early for an bedtime date with our new fan. Life is so slow and yet so full, exploratory and hot here, it hardly feels like we have time or energy for anything else, even each other. Life, love, work, romance, its all simpler here and the people do it all with casuality and enormous presence. Your family members are partners in getting through life as pleasantly and graciously as possible. Your job or your daily work, just the price you pay for a cool evening of doing nothing in the cool sand in front of your house. Your lovers, vendors in obtaining the things you require and your wives, business partners in survival and what pleasantries you can create in the meantime. The culture allows for the fact that surviving is hard enough with its low expectations and casual turn of phrase. There are of course hierarchies, distinct differences between the cement houses and mut huts, teaching jobs and selling hard boiled eggs out on the heat through the windows of dala dalas, families who speak purposeful English full of effort and send their kids to school with a few different outfits instead of just one and families who don’t send their kids to school at all. School costs money, just like anything else, and cash is king, only granting you entry into the community court when its hot in the palm of your hand.

In this world, your relationship with others morph as your image of yourself and your life do- as in a convex mirror at the circus. Suddenly you aren’t who you thought you were. Your motivations get all garbled like internet automated security codes that only slightly resemble the letters you usually know. The people in your life take on new meanings, new masks, new roles on the stage of your journey even as they stand in front of you. And the questions you normally ask of yourself start asking questions of you. So, like the people in our small village, I try not to get too far out ahead of my sandals on a sandy road. Live the days, Savor the nights and cherish the early morning rains in between.

The kids are alright

Nearly two weeks gone now and it feels like twenty. I can hardly remember leaving new york now, feeling like a bug being carried in a jar, not knowing what the next day would look like but knowing I was going somewhere. My jar tipped over and now I’ve got four rotating outfits, geckos living under my bed and 28 primary school kids that don’t understand English (oh, and I have the WORST sandal tan you’ve ever seen). So like any bug would do, Im just attempting to hack it and trying not to bug out.

Most days, after sending the kids out shrieking and tumbling to the school gate at 4pm, I feel like konking myself on the head for getting us into this. Teaching little kids is kind of like being a doctor I should think, you win some battles and you lose some, but most of the time you lose before you even get a round off because the poor kid doesn’t understand a word you are saying. All the usual teachers’ tools I could remember being effective on me when I misbehaved are out the window - ultimatums, isolation, humiliation, threats, you know, all the good stuff. Without English they cant even call your bluffs, they just sort of sit there and stare at you like you’re a big white polar bear attempting to sell mittens on the beach. And well, you are big and you sure are white. Sometimes you get so tired of pulling this one off of the shelves, putting that one in time out for kicking someone in the face, sharpening a pencil because they chewed off the graphite, calling after the one who is hightailing it out of the classroom in your scariest and most matronly voice, cleaning up spilled Ugi with your skirt, preventing one from impaling the other one with a stick, and peeling them off of every square inch of the place that you forget you actually have to teach them something. Usually I get tired of repeating the only Swahili words I know and resort to just gesticulating wildly with my hands. Sometimes it even makes me feel better to drop in a “ you little brats!” out loud. That’s just about the only time its nice to be misunderstood.

But even with my thoughts of suicide throughout the day, the little guys inspire me. Their social systems are so sophisticated, their personalities so distinct and they are so easily made so very happy. All the while they are murmering in Swahili sweet sounding little words and I am so very sorry I cant understand them enough to catch these little unconscious windows into their lives. Like reading a dream catcher over a small, silent sleeper. What are their parents like? Where do they sleep? Will they ever leave Tanzania? What do they hope for in each coming morning? They are the purest form of good intentions and forgiving them is so easy. After you put them in time out, they still come to rest their heads in your lap and hold your hand and want to sit next to you during duck duck goose. They don’t know you but they love you.  Even if you are different. Teaching school to all these powerful future people wrapped up into small, inquisitive and laughing little packages is the only place I don’t feel like a complete stranger in this country.

Back to School

I am walking the long, wide stretch of sand from the teachers quarters to our whitewashed classroom full of primary school kids. Tall palm and other fruit trees line the edges with finger-thin trunks, swaying their leafy tops like the kids do during a song. Two high school kids in their white and maroon uniforms walk by, with a “hello Madam” as they pass. The usual stream of sweat passes down my back and the sun slices through the tree leaves, scattering any oasis of midday shade.   

Our kids are well behaved for the most part, which is suprising given that we don’t know much Kiswahili and have to teach in feeble English, most of which is lost on them. Giddy at the lack of sternness, structure and harsh discipline in our classes (as is often customary in African classes) the kids get distracted quite often, but in the event they can keep their seats they sincerely try hard, searching us with their big dark eyes. They are often quite shy when it comes to being called to answer a question they usually don’t understand in English, but after one gets called up to the board to try an exercise they all are up waving their hands anxious to be called, crying “Madam, teacha, teacha, pick me, teacha!” Some of them know so little English, most of our teaching is done by pointing and imitation. But they are smart, one of them so smart he ends up doing cartwheels and talking to himself in the back during most of the lessons because he finishes so early. Even we have a hard time keeping him busy and preventing him from yelling out the answers for all the other kids.

Their favorite game is duck duck goose. You should see the way they run and flop in the hot sand, grinning these big, garish grins when they get picked. We teachers get selected as goose more often than not, I think because the kids get a huge kick out of outrunning a figure of authority in total silliness. When we do, we always try to pick the silent little ones, heads down who don’t ever expect to get picked. Many of the kids wear the same clothes everyday, or alternate two outfits, and almost all of them look like they are straight out of a goodwill box - gaudy, lacey lime-green eighties dresses with broken zippers, oversized red turtlenecks in the blistering heat, old adidas T-shirts with stretched out necks. Its a reminder of how special an education can be in a little African town like this. The kids are completely and refreshingly unhindered by it and are too smart, energetic and generally joyous to evoke much pity or any other unproductive, well-manipulated first world responses. There is no toilet paper in the bathroom, which is customary in these areas (there is a reason it is polite to only eat with your right hand and rude to use your left). The food is beans and rice or ugali (refined corn flour mixed with water and fluffed) virtually every day of the week for the students. But as far as schools go, this is a luxurious one by local standards, particularly given the fact that there is a working library, a computer lab and mzungu management prohibits the teachers from hitting the children.

Almost a week deep, I knew I’d reach a few points of distinct panic and it seems I’ve hit a pretty good one. The heat in our bedroom soars at night without a cross breeze, augmented now that we are condemned to our bed nets after deciding to go off the malaria medication to save our livers some grief and also to seal off our beds from the nightly jaunt of the cockroaches. But we are paying for it in sweat (lots of it) and sleep, respectively.  The beans, rice and fried food that completely dominate the diet here go from novel to a total nutrient-deficient drag in no time at all. And with a house of 10 people sleeping in three rooms and a room full of primary kids, the pure lack of alone time has been enough to land me smack dap in my first silent breakdown.
And here is that voice in your head, the one you’ve been running from all your life. Telling you you’re way behind on your Kiswahili, you’re not a good teacher, you’re not flexible enough, you cant get comfortable walking in town, you don’t know your way home, you are too overwhelmed by the smells of the markets and the dust and the “mzungus!” shouted at you, if you can’t cool off you are going to scream, why did you come here, what were you trying to prove and why are you so bad at it?? Like a child, standing in the street with dust in her eyes.

The kids make the breakdowns worth having. Watching them try hard and having them run up to your legs and their “teacha, teacha!”s. They are so much work and sometimes you want to send them all home at noon and wash your hands of their shouts, and pushing and backtalk. But somewhere along the way I got bitten by the bug and I somehow look forward to seeing them every day. They make feeling so scared easier to forget.