Blessings in Disguise

Sometimes I wonder if not understanding Mende is a blessing in disguise. Of course, I would give a lot to be fluent in this difficult tonal language, but I do wonder if I really want to know everything that people say about me. I understand enough to realize that I am a continuous source of amusement. While people only laugh at me in a good natured manner, I still do my upmost to try to avoid unintended stand-up comedy routines. To be honest though, if people knew the insignificant things I agonized over, they would have a real reason to laugh at me. 

 

For example, I developed a complex about going to the river to wash my clothes. After a few weeks in Sembehun, I had gathered my lappas and bed sheets and carried them outside to go wash them. Before I had even stepped off my veranda, people were pointing and laughing at me. Nothing out of the ordinary though, considering I was constantly the center of attention during those initial days in my village. I held my head high and continued on my way. I made it about twenty feet before my friend Fatmata spotted me and pulled the clothes out of my hands. Rather than let me progress to the stream, she took my things to her backyard to wash for me. I accepted her kindness somewhat begrudgingly, and decided I would never again venture outside of my own compound to do the laundry. For the next month, I had to listen to stories about how I “didn’t know how to brook my clothes” and Fatmata had to “rescue” me. I’ve never been very good about dealing with suggestions of incompetence. 

Anyway, I eventually decided it was time to move beyond my fear of the kpaku (waterside). Washing clothes in buckets is a pain during the dry season because it requires carrying too much water from the well. After a year in Sembehun, I was no longer the center of attention that I once was, thus I felt ready to brave the stares of laundering in public. On my first trip alone to the stream, the girls nearest to me began laughing hysterically. “Njei bo tongo!” they said, meaning that I had filled my bucket with too much water, thus over-diluting the soap.  “Njei”(water) is a very common word and my form three students love to comment that the math problems I give for homework  are “bo tongo” (too much). So while I knew exactly what they meant, I feigned ignorance. Perhaps it would have been better if I didn’t understand their Mende. . .

By the next time I went to wash my clothes, the novelty of seeing me try to behave like a normal African woman was wearing off. (I was also careful not to overfill my bucket.) On the way home, I managed to walk with my laundry balanced on my head without using a hand to support it. 

“Bi gbua kulei mi lo?” people asked as I returned. (“Are you coming from laundering?”

“Oo,” I answered. (“Yes.” )

Then as I passed, I heard the appreciative laughs and the comments:

“Ah Mende yei go lo panda!” (She knows Mende well!)

“Ngewo va.” (I swear.)

I smile to myself. Maybe I should revise what I said earlier. Knowing Mende is the real blessing in disguise.

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…