Disillusionment

Second day at Senye, some major differences from yesterday. We arrived late, at 9 a.m., and taught every single lesson on our own until the last twenty minutes, when we ran out of steam and hunted down the teacher for CRE. The Kiswahili teacher did not show up for her lesson in the morning, and when we asked her about it after lunch she told us that she would be away for the rest of the week. So it doesn’t seem as though we’re going to get a break any time soon.

Thank goodness for Elizabeth. Team teaching has serious advantages when it comes to extemporaneous lecturing: she would read a section of the textbook and teach it to the class whilst I read the next section, and whilst I taught the information in my section she would read the next. I learnt quite a bit about flowers and plant pollination today.

We did some composition work (autobiographies) and maths problems today. It’s not easy, keeping over 50 adolescents engaged for five hours, and I was almost skipping around in my desperate attempt to entertain them. As Abigail said, it’s like performing. The younger kids in the school are cute and totally harmless, but the hyperexcited, high-pitched “Muzungu! Muzungu!” every time we walk across the courtyard does get old. I felt like screaming, “Yes, I’m a muzungu! Get over it!” That sounds despicable even to me, but I was just so tired and frustrated that I didn’t care anymore.

Tiredness and frustration are pretty much the emotions I feel most often about my work in the primary schools here. I will admit that the longer I am here, the more disillusioned I am becoming. When I was at Lisori the feeling was not so overpowering, because I could work with the kids individually and sense that at least a few of them were getting something out of me. Here at Senye, however, it is so much more daunting; it is just difficult to pay personal attention to all of the 52 kids (there are apparently 52, not 53, and it is impossible to count because they are always going in and out of the classroom), and there is such a range of abilities and interests that I do not think we could attend to the needs of each. And their needs are so great. Marking their compositions today, I felt more and more helpless with each exercise book that I picked up—because their writing was, quite honestly, atrocious. I don’t see how we can possibly help them improve in the two weeks that we’ll be here, even if we work our fingernails off. I don’t even know where we should start. And so the problem is that I’m starting to think: if I can’t make a difference even if I put all of myself into it, then why bother trying so hard at all?

I feel terrible for the kids at Senye, because they deserve a chance as much as the ones at Lisori do, but there is simply no way that I can give the same amount of care to them as I did to my Lisori students. Even with Elizabeth sharing the load, I simply cannot muster up the energy or the emotion. Whilst I wrote one-page replies to the compositions for each one of my Lisorians, I only wrote one- or two-word comments for the ones today. As dreadful as it is, as depressing as it is, it is just easier not to care.