I started at Gyetighi Primary School on Wednesday, making today, Tuesday, a week. It hasn't been the most eventful week, of course, since teaching young children who speak only Swahili isn't my forte. I do teach (at least I hope what I'm doing is teaching), and spend all of the time when I'm not teaching either listening to the other teachers, Eliza and Sara, or studying Swahili from one or more of the three books I now carry around with me (Teach Yourself Swahili, a Lonely Planet Swahili phrasebook, and a Swahili-English/English-Swahili dictionary) and taking notes into a spiral notebook. I find that for my studying techniques, I rely on the a mixture of the methods used in my Spanish and French classes in high school and college mixed with some ultra-personalized, metacognition-driven, idiosyncratic nmemonic device utilization. That's a lot of big fancy wording to describe the process of dragging myself towards stringing together proper sentences coherently. It's a process. I plant the seeds and a few don't grow. It happens, I suppose.
The children at Cheke Chea are cute, loud, mostly obedient, and bored. Quite a few of them have worn the same clothes to school on the five days I've been there. It's difficult to get used to the scars and injuries I see on some of the kids. The girl who sat next to me today, for example, was missing all of the toenails on her right foot (I couldn't see the left). I sometimes look around the room, at the children, the books, the hand-drawn educational posters on the walls, the "first aid kit" (a tupperware box with band-aids in it) and think back to the "poor" schools I attended in Jersey. I'm not saying going to a school that had no paper for a year was the best time of my life, but Middle Township schools always had, say, lights in every classroom. A janitor. A library of sorts was in every school. We had a nurse, just in case. That kind of stuff is not to be found at Gyetighi. Fewer pedophiles at Gyetighi than Middle though (ba-zing!).
I also find myself thinking of my former teachers while I'm in class. No, not in any nostalgic Tuesdays With Morrie way; I could have done without many of my teachers at Middle who weren't Doc G., Mr. Peck or Mrs. Judge. I mean when I'm sitting, surrounded by a bunch of students who may or may not be acting up and I can't tell but it's been a long day and the pattern isn't helping my perception, the look that forms on my face--the mix of suspicion, irritation, and reluctance to jump the gun--reminds me of many a frustrated but just barely composed faculty member, perched in the front of the room, inner monologue a-raging behind a silent fraction of a scowl. This is something that happens at Gyetighi, but more often at the Children's Village. The Rift Valley kids are all smart, be they emotionally intelligent, technically skilled, or top students in their classes. Each is savvy in some way or another. If "in some way" is school smarts, it's the other that I have to look out for. For example, I recently found out that the doe-eyed, pensive, "I need a pen for school" song and dance my Serengeti kids were pulling the first couple of days Bill and I were there was merely a set-up for a black market pen and pencil racket plaguing the playgrounds of Gyetighi Primary School. The nerve!
Saa ya mayai na mkate. Baadaye!
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