Because I want you to learn

Teaching in Sembehun has convinced me that education is not dependent on physical resources. In the absence of computers and smart boards learning will stem from a single piece of chalk as it moves across a piece of cellotex blackened with battery acid. When there are no textbooks, students will learn Shakespeare by memorizing hand copied lines from The Merchant of Venice. Standing under the shade of a mango tree, they will open Portia’s boxes, not minding that they were constructed from sheets of paper torn from a notebook. 

Having little teaches you to value what you have. A year ago, Kankaylay Junior Secondary School was nothing more than a cement building with broken desks and pane-less windows. It still has broken windows and desks, but now it holds memories as well. Kankaylay is a place where I have gone to teach every day.  I have seen the school prefects dragging broken benches outside to use a stone to pound in the loose nails. I have watched girls carrying buckets of water on their head while the boys dug into the ground to churn up the earth. They scooped up the mud with their hands to pack it on the walls of the primary school.  If having a place to learn requires building it with your bare hands, that is exactly what students will do. 

In early September before school re-opened, I spent my days interviewing the new form I students. One morning while I was at the school, Zakaria Swaray came to greet me. He surveyed the school compound which had grown into a small jungle during the rainy months of July and August when school was closed.

“We skul de opin bete lanin no go de,”he said. (When school opens, we won’t be learning much).

“Why?”I asked.

“Look how the place is dirty. We will have to pull all this grass.”

“Or we could pull it now,” I suggested, not expecting him to take me seriously. 

Zakaria stood frowning at the weeds for a moment, then he bent down and began uprooting them.

“I’m only doing this because I want to learn,” he said somewhat defensively lest I think he enjoyed weeding.

I got up and joined him, breathing in the fresh scent of damp sun-warmed earth. That’s why I’m doing this too, I thought, because I want you to learn.

Homeless

It was evening and Amara Kamara and Sannie Swaray were sitting on my veranda flipping through the pages of a thick Maryland public schools Language Arts textbook. The 900 page volume with its glossy cover had been donated to the Peace Corps and ended up in my possession. Really, it should be in my school's “library,” but since Kankaylay doesn’t even have a spare room that could be used to store books in, I keep the donated books at my house, where they get a decent amount of use from students. Primary school children are particularly fond of looking at the pictures, so they will come to my door and command in Mende “Waa bukui.” (Come with a book).   

Sannie read aloud as he turned the pages of the book. 

“Do you know why that woman is sitting there?” I asked, pointing to a picture of a homeless woman, bundled up against the cold, sitting on a street next to a cardboard sign and a plastic tray with a few coins in it. 

“No. Why?” Sannie and Amara ask. 

I explained that she was homeless and she was sitting there in hopes that someone would help her and give her money. 

“So she can buy a house?”

“No, so she can buy food.”

“Where does she sleep?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the picture. 

My students looked at me aghast. I have never heard of someone sleeping outside in Sembehun. Certainly, such a thing would never happen in a Sierra Leonean village. Here, if your friend has no food, you invite him to eat. If he has no house, you spread a mat for him on your floor. Things don’t work that way in the United States. Not everyone has family and friends to turn to when things get bad, I explained. 

“Here, we would never let someone sleep outside,” Sannie said, affirming my comments. “Everyone’s trying to get to America, but they don’t know that it’s not easy for everyone there. I have more than people in America.”

I wanted to capture Sannie’s words and impress them on the minds of all my students. I wonder if he knew how true that statement really was. It is not simply a matter of having a clean bed to sleep in and a place to store your things; it is about family and community and a boundless optimism that I cannot understand. I wish more people knew the truth about Sierra Leone. While on paper, it is one of the poorest countries in the world, it has a wealth that no economist can measure. I wish that instead of escaping to the western world, the best and the brightest would stay and carry out their successes here.

Evening

As the sun was setting, the sky began to clear. The formerly solid sheet of grey was swept into small white puffs whose indistinct borders trailed into the pale blue sky. Night fell, and the stars began to sparkle in the blackness.

I stepped onto my back veranda and switched off my flashlight. The orange glow from my neighbors’ kerosene lamp danced off the cement walls of their house. The chirping crickets mingled with the solemn sound of the azan. Together they formed a chorus that almost drowned out the distant hum of the generator across the street, the only source of electricity for miles.

Slipping off my flip-flops, I walked carefully into my gravel-covered backyard. The stones were cold, but mostly dry under my bare feet. I lay down, settling my weight so that no sharp rocks would dig into my back. I was hidden by the dark and the zinc slabs that fenced in my backyard. Invisible to the world, I listened to the chattering of children next door, the slightly crackled voice coming from a radio, and the crunching footsteps of someone passing by my house.

My eyes followed the stars, tracing Orion’s belt and the big dipper. Even in rural Ohio, I had never seen such a multitude of stars, so I felt certain new constellations must be waiting to be discovered. I formed the pictures in my mind. A giraffe stretched its neck up to the leaves of a tall tree. A child waved her legs and arms out to make a snow angel.

“Manungima?” A passing voice called. It was a question asked to the dark to see if I was still awake. It was a greeting that did not really demand a response. Nevertheless, it broke the spell; it cut through the sensation of being alone and invisible under a vast starlit sky. I got up and went inside.

Ramadan

It was a smell I associated with those fair trade Tibetan gift shops on Coventry or with midnight mass in the Catholic Church on Christmas Eve. The scent of burning incense would settle among the sarongs and beaded necklaces; it would waft down the church aisle with a robed priest and the solemn melody of a hymn. As I knelt in the mosque in Sembehun, I found it interesting that one smell could conjure up two such distinct memories.

I rocked forward onto the balls of my feet, trying to mimic the graceful motion of the other women as they rose. The woven prayer mat felt smooth beneath my toes. Light filtered through the slits in the cement wall that divided the women’s portion of the mosque off from the larger room. I liked feeling invisible under the lappa I was using as a head covering. When I kept my head down, only my hands and bare feet betrayed my white skin and for a moment I was anonymous. When people recognized me, they acknowledged my presence with small welcoming smiles. I followed the others as we listened to the repeated refrains of Allah Ahkbar.

Allah Ahkbar – we bent forward at the waist, hands on our knees.

Allah Ahkbar – we stood straight.

Allah Ahkbar – we knelt, foreheads pressed to the ground.

Allah Ahkbar – we sat up, palms open.

Allah Ahkbar – we laid our foreheads to the ground again.

Allah Ahkbar – we stood.

I decided on a whim that I would fast for part of Ramadan. I had planned to be traveling for most of the month, but was spending one week at site in my predominantly Muslim village. When my neighbors asked if I was fasting, I figured I might as well try. They say it is not good to cut fast alone, so my neighbor Regina came to my house every evening after the 7pm call to prayer. We had both cooked earlier, so we would sit on my veranda dipping our hands into the same bowl to scoop up rice and plasas or cassava with soup. After eating, Regina invited me to the mosque for the evening prayers.

For a year, I have enjoyed listening to the call to prayer pouring from the mosque behind my house. Especially when school is not in session, I find my days punctuated by the azan. I wake up before dawn with the first call to prayer and stay in bed waiting for the first glimmers of light to shine through my window. I walk by the mosque every Friday afternoon, but I had never entered. I was curious to see inside the mosque for a change, so I agreed to accompany Regina.

One of the things that I appreciate about Sierra Leoneans is their religious tolerance. The tension that characterizes relations between Christians and Muslims in much of the world is completely absent here. Instead, regardless of whether you choose to pray in a church or a mosque you will be welcomed with open arms. For me, fasting for Ramadan had little to do with religion. On the contrary, it was a way to be a part of my community – to have a child teach me the words of an Arabic prayer, to have my neighbor wake me at 3am to give me a steaming plate of rice, to understand something I didn’t understand before.

Exam Revision

 It was revision week before exams, which meant that no one was really teaching (or reviewing for that matter). The school dissolving into chaos usually makes my want to go crazy myself, but at the end of term three, with the JSS III students busy sitting their mock final for the public examination, things felt slightly different. With JSS III occupied, I had five extra free periods which meant I could go into any class I felt like and teach. By some miraculous twist of fate, I had actually managed to cover almost all the review material I wanted to get through in JSS II by Tuesday, and I still had a double period scheduled with them on Thursday morning.

After lunch on Tuesday, many of the students began sneaking away from the school. I had spent the morning bouncing between the JSS I classrooms and another teacher had spent all morning making form II copy the periodic table into their notebooks, but other than that no one had been inside a classroom.

“Are you going to teach form two now?” I asked the science teacher, knowing that he was scheduled to teach them sixth period, but figuring that they had already had about all the science they could handle for one day.

“No, they’re all starting to leave,” he replied.

“We’re going to get off early then?” I asked, verbalizing the assumption that no one seemed willing to voice.

“I think so.” A definite yes.

“Okay, I’m going to teach form two for a few minutes then before we go,” I said. About half the class was present so teaching didn’t feel like a waste of time.

As the lesson was starting, it began to rain. The rain steadily increased as we reviewed perfect and continuous tenses. When I had finished everything I wanted to cover, I asked if the students wanted to go home. I knew full well that the answer would be no. Asking students to walk in the rain would be like asking them to eat hot coals.

“Let’s stay here first,” they replied.

“But Miss Kenley can balance the rain, so you will go and bring us an umbrella yes?” Betty Swaray joked, meaning that I could dodge raindrops.

“I’m too tired to balance the rain now, otherwise I would. But if we are going to be here, let’s try to translate stories into English,” I said. I figured translating stories from Krio to English was a good way to keep students occupied and help them understand the verb tenses I had been trying to teach. One student was elected to tell a story. His story was about a wild animal in the bush who killed dozens of people a week, a chief who promised to give his daughter in marriage to the man who killed the beast, and some twins with magic powers. Drawn to the expressive voice speaking a language they could understand, some of the form one students began to slip into the back of the class. When the tale had come to a close, I asked them to explain the story again in English.

“Okay, let me try,” Abdul Rahman said. As he talked, the others occasionally assisted with a word of interjected with a correction. The translating of the story eventually dissolved into the students trying to explain a word to me that they only knew in Mende.  

“That thing, it looks like dirty but it’s not a dirty.”

“Just say rock.”

“But it’s not a rock.”

“Look, look! There’s one there,” they pointed out the window.

I failed to see anything out of the ordinary despite their incessant pointing, so Osman ran outside in the rain and pointed to a small mound of dirt that I assumed was an animal’s burrow. Everyone had gotten out of their seats to stand by the window, and when Osman returned to the class no one bothered sitting down again. Instead they stood around Abdul Rahman’s desk, while he resumed his translating.

“Snake!” Sannie Swaray suddenly shouted, pointing out the window again. “There, there! In the tree!”

A long brownish-green snake was wound around a palm tree. It’s thick body encircled the tree several times and it stretched its head out in the rain like the arched neck of a swan. We abandoned the story-telling to watch the snake, because clearly a beast twenty yards away is more fascinating than the man-eating creature of an imaginary tale.  

If not for the rain, the students said they would go and kill it for me. I smiled to myself, thinking that it would be a shame to kill the snake, which was strangely fascinating. I found myself admiring its slow poise, the still power in its long coiled body.  Then again, my interest in saving the snake was not at all practical. They say snake meat is “sweet” and I’m sure it would have made a lovely addition to the evening plasas. Come to think of it, I probably should have demanded that the students go out in the rain and kill it, just so I could say that I ate a snake in Africa.

               

Toting Sticks

The wind sweeps across the ground. Window shutters clang. Doors swing on their hinges. The branches of the coconut trees wave violently like yellow-green tails of a kite. Avocados fall with a clang against my zinc roof. People are rushing inside to escape the coming rain, but I sit on the railing of my veranda, smiling like a crazy person, thrilled by the imminent arrival of the storm. In a matter of minutes the dusty path running along the side of my house will become a river of sweeping red-brown water. Some of the children from next door will run and jump in it, letting the water carry them along for a few yards – their own natural slip n’ slide. I would love to join them or at least stand directly under the runoff from my roof and wash my hair, but out of deference for what my neighbors think of my sanity I will refrain.

I have always loved rain – beating in steady torrents, driven in gusts of uncontrollable wind, stirring up the smell of earth and grass. After the first storm of rainy season, I discovered my fence had fallen down. I surveyed the damage with Amara Kamara, one of my JSS I students. He told me that he could fix the fence for me. I could have called a carpenter of course, but I figured that fixing fences was probably one of those talents that everyone over age eight in my village seems to possess. The first step to fixing fences is gathering the sticks – a task in which I insisted I was capable of assisting.

We set off one morning to gather the long slim branches we would use to build the fence. We snaked off the Suleihun Road on a footpath leading into the bush, heading towards the place where Amara’s father was clearing land for a farm. We wove our way over the uneven ground, skirting pits where people had once dug for diamonds. The trees would open up to a large burned clearing where people would soon begin to plant cassava, then the forest would swallow us up again. Finally we came to the site of Mr. Kamara’s farm. The recently cut trees lay on the ground, their leaves beginning to turn brown. Amara selected several long straight branches to cut and tie together with a piece of vine. I wound the head cloth that I had brought with me around my hand to make a “cata” which I would place on my head so I could carry my portion of the sticks comfortably. The branches were light and easy to lift. After we had walked a little ways, I got used to balancing them. I pleased to discover that I could drop both my hands and walk along the uneven path without letting the branches fall.

When I first arrived in Sierra Leone, I would watch people carry things on their heads with a sense of awe. Their necks and backs are perfectly still. Their hips swing with a graceful motion. Never once do they falter or let their loads wobble. I will never be able to tote things like a Sierra Leonean, but I am still pleased by my minor accomplishments. I find it quite satisfying to be able to carry a bucket of water on my head and only use one hand to steady it. Granted, I do not have many opportunities to practice carrying water considering that everyone offers to do it for me…

Dis swit pas di wan yu bin gi mi

One of my first Impressions when I got to Sembehun was that I could never live up to people’s expectations or repay the kindness they had shown me. I certainly was not going there in hopes of changing the world, as many people seemed to believe I could. I was just going to teach, and even that I was uncertain about. What did I know about managing a classroom or making information accessible to students whose life experiences were so different than my own? As things turned out, managing a classroom was not as difficult as I anticipated and my students’ lives were not as foreign to me as I once imagined.

There are brief instances when I am teaching that I believe maybe I can repay the kindness of my community. Being a part of my students’ lives matters. I am doing something for those kids - or so I tell myself. Sure, I show up to school every day and teach. I care about my students. I celebrate their successes and mourn their failures. But honestly, I am just doing my job. There is nothing remarkable or spectacular in that, yet somehow people still manage to treat me as if I have done something wonderful for them. It is nice to hear their praise, but I cannot help feeling their words are unearned.

It has taken me awhile to realize that no one expects me to earn the respect they give me. Even if I were the worst teacher in the world, my students would still be expected to treat me well, to go out of their way to fetch me water, bring me pineapples, or sweep my porch. Even if I were a terrible person, my neighbors would greet me every morning, let me ditch in line at the water pump, and help repair my fence when the goats tear it down. To me, all this feels like unearned kindness.  I want to be able to repay the things that people do for me. I suppose that is a very American mindset – we have to work for whatever we have, and in turn, we do not give people things for nothing. I do not mean to imply that such a mindset is entirely negative, only it is not applicable to village life in Sierra Leone.

I think I consciously accepted for the first time that I will never be able to do as much good for people here as they have done for me on the day that Abu Bakar Sedik gave me mangos. Abu Bakar Sedik is one of those people who always seem to give me perspective when I grow frustrated. It is not that Abu's life is particularly tragic as far as things go in rural Sierra Leone; it is that, despite the tragedies of his past, he is eternally optimistic. Abu is just a fifteen year old boy who is intelligent, hardworking, and quick to laugh. He is one of seventeen children, only four of whom are still alive. His father is dead, so Abu helps his mother by raising crops to sell. He is the first in his family to get an education. One could argue that this child's life has elements of a tragedy, but Abu goes through life with a smile. He does not see himself as a victim, but believes he is privileged - and he is right. He is the one who survived. He is the one who got to go to school.

Abu is one of my best students. He has never asked me for anything, but goes out of his way to do things for me. He will bring me pineapples or avocados and would never dream of letting me carry a bucket of water from the pump. One evening, after Abu had carried a bucket of water to my house for me, and I offered to give him some mangos. (My students were true to their promise to give me more mangos than I can eat.) Abu thanked me and said yes he would like the mangos, so I went inside and selected the best two to give to him - ripe, but not yet turning mushy. The next day, Abu showed up at me house with five mangoes of his own. "Dis mango swit pas do wan yu bin gi mi," Abu announced as he handed the mangoes to me. Thanks for dissing my gift, I thought ruefully as I accepted the mangoes. It turned out to be true though. The mangoes were sweeter than the ones I had given him.

I cannot help but think of those mangos as a symbol of life in Sembehun. I can try my hardest to help people here - offer over my best two mangos so to speak - but then they will turn around and do something that surpasses whatever I did for them. They will come with five mangos that happen to be more delicious than the mangos that I gave away in the first place. Whatever good I do here will never measure up to the good that people do to me. That is a very humbling thought, and one worth remembering.

Sharp Green Mangos

“The sharp green mango bitten in turns,” writes Senegalese author Mariama Ba in her novel So Long a Letter. I am drawn to the imagery in those words, the vision of two young African girls in school uniforms passing an unripe mango back and forth between them, savoring its tangy flavor on their tongues.

I arrived in Sierra Leone at the end of mango season, and it is only now that the trees are growing heavy once again with bright green fruits. My students have assured me that once the mangos are ripe, they will bring me more than I can eat. I believe them, since that was the case with oranges at the height of orange season. But in the meantime, I watch the unripe mangos on the low hanging branches, tempted to stretch out my hand and take one. I see people walking around eating those mangos all the time, but I have the sense that it’s like eating the cookie dough before you bake the cookies – not really good manners, but delicious and absolutely worth a mild belly ache.

My initial craving for a green mango was based mostly on curiosity. I wanted to know what a “sharp green mango” tasted like. I was pleased when one of my JSS I students offered me a bite of his mango after school one day. The inside of an unripe mango is white and crisp like an apple. It is deliciously sour. The skin is smooth and soft and can be eaten. As the mango ripens, the inside grows orange and sweet; the skin toughens and takes on a reddish hue.

Ripe mangos are delicious and worth waiting for, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the occasional green mango. After all, it’s not like I would ever make chocolate chip cookies without taking a few bites of the unbaked dough anyway.

Throwing Stones

Having even the slightest idea how cleaning days at my school work is a sure sign that I am beginning to understand teaching in Sierra Leone. Almost every Thursday afternoon is devoted to cleaning the school compound. The first time I witnessed the school cleaning was one of the more uncomfortable experiences I’ve had here (which is saying something.) I stood awkwardly watching students pull weeds and use cutlasses to hack away at the wilderness which was encroaching in the school compound. The other teachers made a student bring a chair for me so I could sit down and watch the work in comfort. I felt extremely lazy and ineffectual sitting there doing nothing as the students worked.

I will never enjoy cleaning days, but as time passes I have begun to appreciate them for what they are. I tend to think now that I was incredibly spoiled to have a janitor clean my school for me while growing up. Who did I think was going to do the school maintenance here if the students didn’t do the work? Besides, there are benefits to giving students the responsibility for keeping their school clean; it gives them a different king of appreciation for their education by instilling them with a sense of ownership for the school. Cleaning days can also be fun if you go in with the right attitude. Maybe it’s a bit like when I was in high school and we had red/gold days at CSG…(minus the hot apple cider and donuts, naturally.)

On one particular Thursday, the principal decided to cancel school for the entire day so the students could go brush a field about a mile from our village, where he hoped to build a new school. “Brushing” entails hacking down trees with cutlasses and tearing up the patches of tall spiky grass. The atmosphere was cheerful as we set off along the road to the field. Only I and one other teacher decided to accompany the students on the brushing outing. Since I’m not particularly intimidating (or adept at brushing for that matter), the other teacher took charge of making sure the students were working.  I spent my time wandering around chatting with some of the girls who thought it was hysterical that I was willing to join them in tearing a few weeds out of the rocky rust-colored soil. They were also amused that I was concerned by the fact that one of my JSS I boys thought it was a good idea to climb to the top of a tree that was in the process of being cut down. (In case like me you find that worrisome, you will be happy to hear that the child did not fall to his death.)

By lunch time, everyone was hot and tired and ready to go back to the school where some of the JSS III girls were preparing bulgur with sauce. The other teacher took a bicycle back so he could go check to see if the cooking was underway, but I walked with the students.  The procession of one hundred or so youth walking in unevenly spaced clusters trailed out along the highway. Behind me, some of the students began shouting.

“What’s going on?” I asked, turning back towards the shouts.

“They’re throwing stones. Let’s go quick!” Kadiatu Swaray, one of my JSS II students who was walking beside me answered.

Apparently, the students had found one of the mentally ill men in our village walking along the road. This particular man has a reputation for being prone to violence, but he keeps to himself as long as people do not disturb him. I can only imagine the numerous things a group of adolescent boys might have said to provoke the man, but whatever happened, the man began hurling rocks at the students. In retaliation, the students picked up stones of their own to throw. I sensed the situation was quickly escalating as the chorus of shouts grew louder and rocks flew through the air.

“Quick, let’s go!” Kadiatu urged me again, her voice full of concern. She was right, it is better to avoid the mob than to confront it, but I could not stand by and allow my students to stone a mentally ill man. I ignored her and strode back towards the fight.

I grabbed the arm of the boy nearest to me – Abu Bakar Bockarie – whose hands were full of stones.

“Don’t throw them,” I said. Abu Bakar has the reputation for being a troublemaker, but he is also intelligent and has been a perfect angel in my class ever since I helped him avoid a flogging from father. (The flogging was regarding an incident when the boy was innocent for once, so I wrote a letter on his behalf.)

“Don't throw them?” Abu Bakar asked.

“Yes, what you are doing is very bad. You cannot throw stones at a crazy man,” I scolded him.

Abu Bakar dropped the stones quickly, as if he had suddenly realized that he had a snake in his hand. He looked stricken for a moment, afraid of the disappointment in my voice. However, he quickly rallied and began marching around to the other students and yelling at them to stop throwing stones. I then sought out the school prefects in the crowd so they could help me restore order. I breathed a sigh of relief when the last students abandoned their stones.

I realized that my students did not fully understand why I was upset that they were throwing rocks at a man whose “head don flop.” They could not understand why I was always quick to defend the mentally ill from taunts, laughter, or violence. However, my students knew I was disappointed in their behavior, and for some reason that was enough to make them stop.

Fairy Tales

The sky is black. An opaque curtain of water vapor covers the stars, or maybe it is a film of orange dust risen from the sun scorched land and caught in the air. Either way, crowded on my veranda in the glow of my headlamp, the dark hardly matters.

“You don change di battery?” an ever-observant child asks, noticing that my head lamp is considerably brighter today than it was before.The primary school children who live next door to me have taken to coming to my porch every night to study. One 5^th grade girl named Fati asked me to write something for her to read. I began to write the story of Cinderella, but then thought better of it. Fairy tales tend to be the antithesis of gender empowerment and the last thing a little girl in Sierra Leone needs is another story about a weak female character who is saved by a man and a fairy because she had the good fortune of being born beautiful. These critiques occurred to me just as I was writing “After Ella’s father died, her step-mother began to treat her very badly.”

I paused, my pen hanging hesitantly in the air. Fati was living in a society where the fairy tale premise of Cinderella was not completely foreign. It is a world where a woman’s success is often based on luck and a rich husband, but it is also a world where girls have the chance to go to school. I decided I would alter the Cinderella story to make it a tale of hard work and determination not magic and good fortune.

Over the course of a week, I added to the story a few lines at a time so Fati could read them and learn the new words. In my Cinderella story, Ella and the prince are friends, but the king forbids his son to marry Ella because she is too poor. However, after Ella wins a competition to prove she is the most intelligent woman in the kingdom the King agrees to the marriage. Granted, my story is every bit as much of a fantasy as the Grimm brothers’ version, but I think it portrays a slightly better role model for an eleven year girl.

Fati may not be the most intelligent child I’ve met, but she has character and spunk which probably counts for more in life than simple intelligence. She’s the sort of child whose determination will push her to spend an hour struggling through a few pages of a story, who loves to talk, and who will stomp on a scorpion if it happens to cross her path.

One night, the children stayed on my porch later than usual. As it was approaching 10pm, one boy named Amara noticed how dark it was and was afraid to go home. He claimed he was worried about “kid-nappy-ers” as he calls them, but really he was worried about getting in trouble with his father for staying out too late. And what better way to avoid a beating than to get your teacher to walk you home? Surely your parents can’t complain that you were out too late studying.

Thus, Fati, our neighbor Alusine, and I all walked Amara home. After we left him safely at his porch, we made our way back across the path to our own homes with the beam of my flashlight guiding our steps. As we walked, I noticed a small creature scuttle across the path.

“Wait, point back”, Fati said, meaning point the flashlight back there.

As the beam of the flashlight fell across the creature, it began to run, but Fati stopped it with her flip-flop clad foot. She stomped on the creature until it lay in a still broken heap in the dust. A scorpion, Alusine informed me. “Santem Fati no bin see em ii get fo kill mortal man. Quick wi dat tail ii de kill posin, like snake no mo.” (If Fati hadn’t seen that scorpion, it might have killed someone. It can easily kill someone with its tail, just like a snake.)

I have to respect a girl who doesn’t even flinch when it comes to slaying a scorpion. Maybe I should write a version of a fairy tale where the princess locked in the tower slays the dragon herself…

Kids Will Be Kids

At first glance my school is nothing like a school in America. In the morning, students use grass brooms to sweep leaves from the school compound. A 8:00 a.m., when the bell rings for assembly, the students line up to recite a prayer in Arabic and sing Salone's national anthem. No one is to walk while the national anthem is being sung. (I made the mistake of not freezing in my tracks as soon as I heard the first words of the anthem once and everyone was shocked by my audaciousness. Of course, I was forgiven due to my ignorant status as a foreigner.) After the last lines fade, late comers hoping to avoid six lashes with the dried reed canes try to sneak into assembly among the other students. Meanwhile, the primary school children drag their desks and benches outside under the trees because the school building that collapsed has yet to be rebuilt. From the outside, no one is going to forget that we're in  a rural African village school. Inside the classroom, some of the differences begin to melt. It is true that the education system and the style of teaching are vastly different here. It is true that limited resources pose unique challenges. However, the kids are the same as kids in America in many ways. You have the know-it-alls, the under-achievers, the kids who really want to learn, and those who spend an unnecessary amount of effort causing problems. You have the frightened JSS I students who are just leaving primary school and the JSS II students who will be graduating this year and think they own the school.

Teaching makes me wonder what my own high school teachers really thought of us. At times, I honestly cannot comprehend why students are acting so obnoxious or are so horrified by the amount of work I give them. (Which, by the way, is nothing compared to the amount of work my own high school teachers gave) In other instances, I find the antics of trouble-makers more amusing than irritating. In order not to loose face as an authority figure, I stay relatively stern in class. However, at times, it is difficult to keep a straight face in class when students cause problems. One afternoon, I turned around from the chalkboard to see Fatmata's face covered in chalk dust. "What happened?" I asked. "It is this boy," she says, throwing the duster at Umani.
"Don't mind them," Isata tells me. "He is her boyfriend." Oh fine, as long as it's just flirtatious banter, go ahead and wack each other over the head with the eraser, I think, wishing sarcasm could translate language barriers.
"Give me the duster and write your notes," I say. I turn back to the chalkboard partly to continue writing the definition of metaphor, and partly to hide my amused smile.

No matter where you are in the world, it is true what they say - kids will be kids.

I only laugh so as to keep from weeping

Yes, I am entitling this blog entry after a line from a Knight's Tale. (What? It's a great movie)

To be honest, I am rarely on the verge of tears when I resort to laughing at inappropriate moments. It is only in retrospect that I realize I am laughing at things that really aren't very funny. Or funny at all, for that matter. That being said, laughter is great preventative medicine. It keeps you in a bright mood when you would otherwise run the risk of becoming bitter and frustrated. So I want to share an example of the times "I only laugh so as to keep from weeping."

One Friday morning, I left my house with my empty rubber bucket in hand and headed towards the pump. Friday is the Muslim holy day so we don't have school. This means for me Friday is "brooking" day - or the day I use my two rubber tubs and a little plastic bag of powdered "Africana" soap to wash all  my clothes. I was never a fan of doing laundry in the US even though it is ridiculously easy to throw all your things into a washing machine, but for some reason I enjoy the methodical process of scrubbing my clothes by hand and beating them against a rock to work out any stains. Thus, with my bucket in tow I proceeded to the well to get my brooking water. Nine year old Ibrahim stopped me to ask in Mende where I was going. I replied that I was going to get water, to which Ibrahim answered something that sounded to me like "there is no water."

"What?" I asked, thinking that perhaps I had misunderstood him.
"Wata no de." He repeated in Krio, thus I clearly got the message that there was no water at the pump.
"Okay, I'll go across the street."
"No, that pump is broken too."
"So where do you go to get water?"
"We can't get water."
"You can't get water?"
"No, we no de get again!" (We won't get water again!)

For some reason I found this completely hysterical. A little boy was telling me that they would never get water again in the village. It was only after suppressing my laughter that I realized it wasn't actually a funny situation. The idea that the entire village could be without a clean water source was actually rather horrifying. Of course, this was not the case. There are other water wells on the outskirts of the village so I went there to fetch my water. I did decide to put off brooking my clothes not knowing when the pump would be fixed. I figured it was important to conserve water, since wells run the risk of going dry, especially now that it hasn't rained for a few months. I was mildly surprised that the pump nearest to my house was fixed within 48 hours. Apparently the threat of "we no de get again" was not a laughing matter, so people got straight to the business of fixing the well.