A Brief Hiatus

The primary schools are all taking district exams today and tomorrow, so the WISERBridge people have a short holiday. It is a welcome and—I daresay—well-deserved break! I drew some portraits and took a much-needed three-hour nap, which partly made up for the three hours of sleep I’d had the night before (long story; to cut it short, Sadhna, Caitlin and Billy were in the dining room and became somewhat alarmed by a mysterious figure walking around the campus allegedly carrying a bow and arrow. When I walked in to ask them to turn the noise down, Sadhna almost screamed because she thought I was the strange man). I hadn’t thought it would be such a long nap, but I tottered into the dining room after waking up to discover that it was already 4:22p.m. Oops.

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Lunch today was also a good affair. Eggs, kale and spaghetti. I was a happy girl.

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Frank, Joy and I (a trio I dubbed the MBCSA—Muhuru Bay Chinese Student Association) went down to Tagache in the evening to buy some food. Frank wanted to make Asian-style peanut butter noodles; he is becoming quite ambitious with his cooking! I was also on the lookout for sweet potatoes. When I found out that Joy didn’t know the difference between these and regular potatoes, I almost threw a fit. Had I not had a sore throat…

We didn’t find the sweet potatoes—apparently they are only available on market day, which is Friday—but we did meet two drunkards. I don’t think I’d ever seen a drunkard at Tagache before this, but I’d heard the stories. One of the drunkards called Frank Bruce Lee, and ‘Jack’ Chan, and Jet Li, and tried to demonstrate what I think were his martial arts skills. Frank dealt with it well and managed to laugh it off, and the other onlookers laughed with him as well. I can’t imagine that they have much regard for the drunken man. Drinking probably isn’t the greatest of Muhuru Bay’s problems—although it is much more prolific than it should be, given the dominant religions here.

The man’s drunken words bring up an interesting issue, however. I’d faced similar assumptions myself when teaching at the primary schools. I’d been asked whether I knew Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, whether Jet Li was still alive, and Kennedy had translated for me that the younger kids at Senye thought I looked like the football player Jee-Sun Park. These four faces seem to be the most exposure many of the residents here have had to Asia. Several times I’d had to explain that China and Japan and Korea (I didn’t even try to differentiate North and South—sorry!) were very different countries, like Kenya and Tanzania and Uganda, and although the people looked alike we really were not the same thing at all. And we couldn't travel freely to the other countries, either.

It doesn’t upset me that I have to explain such things, because to be honest I am not surprised that the people here lack knowledge about the rest of the world. Much as I wish it weren’t this way, most have never been out of Muhuru Bay, whilst for many others the furthest they have ever travelled is to Migori. The rest of the world simply is not pertinent to their lives here—and really, they have no way of learning about it. The radio, the limited access to the Internet, the occasional broadcasted football game and Hollywood movie—this really is about all the connection they have to anywhere that is not within walking distance. Our first sit-in Social Studies class at Senye was a lecture about Nairobi; it made me sad to realise that we, complete foreigners with our brief two-day stay in the city, had seen more of the capital and were more credible authorities on the subject than the teacher ever did or was.

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It was Elizabeth’s birthday today. After dinner we surprised her with a cake that Tara had bought all the way back in Kisumu, and somehow managed to bring back intact and without arousing suspicion (she’d told Elizabeth that the box held iced cookies that Abigail had asked for). Billy had managed not to spill the secret this time! The cake was slightly frozen when we took it out of the fridge, but Elizabeth was still delighted. We are starting quite a tradition for birthdays around here!

Caning

A boy was caned in front of me today. I don’t know his name; I don’t think I can recognise him even from the 53 (it turns out there are 53 of them after all) faces in the class, much less remember what he looked like. Because when I watched him, it was not fear that I saw; it was nothing. Actually, it probably was not nothing—he must’ve had some sort of expression—but I was looking for fear, and I did not find it. Nothing like what I’d been expecting to see from a boy being caned.

It threw me off guard. When I realised that the teacher had sent the boy to fetch a cane, I was very, very nervous. I panicked. I didn’t know what I would do—should do—could do—if the caning did happen. I knew that I would stop him if he hurt the boy. I worked up the guts and prepared to step forward. That was a very tense five minutes for me.

But what I saw was very different from what I’d expected.

The teacher told the student to lie down on the ground. The boy did as he was told, and the teacher struck him three times. He made no sound. It was over before I’d gotten over myself. But what astonished me the most was that the other kids were laughing and jeering the whole time, as though it was some kind of joke.

Several times I've noticed the people here laughing about really rather morbid things. The teachers at Lisori, laughing about how “God knows where the next meal will come from; the people don’t;” Kennedy, about the police officer who arrested Baracka and stops our vehicle every time just to make us feel uncomfortable; the kids, about the caning and the fear-based system the teachers use to keep control. I don’t know if it’s a coping mechanism that they have learnt to use in order to deal with the tension and anxiety or if I am misinterpreting the situation, but it is strange to me. And kind of awkward as well. I’m not quite sure how to react: if I laugh with them, I feel out-of-place; but if I don’t laugh, it also seems inappropriate.

I still don’t know how I feel about this caning experience. In some ways it was not as bad as I’d imagined, because the boy made no commotion. I couldn't even tell if he was in pain. But it was also worse, because their reaction seems so wrong to me. I spoke to some of the others back at WISER, and we could only reason that caning is just so normalised here that the students find it entertaining when one of them is caned. I didn’t do anything then, partly because I was surprised, partly because I didn’t want to make a scene, mostly because I was too scared. But I do want to speak to the students before I speak with the teachers, because I want to know why they behave the way they do.

Another Depressing Post

We drove in to Senye this morning to discover that Class Eight was in the middle of their Maths exam. It turned out that they would be taking exams for the next two days as well, so we wouldn’t be needed until Friday. So we sat around planning for Friday’s lessons until the first exam was over, and then helped to mark the answer sheets. We were working out the problems (some of which were very badly written indeed) when we heard the noise of a piki—and the unmistakable voice of Margaret herself, sitting astride behind Baracka, as bustling and energetic as ever!

She was not pleased to find out that the Class Eights were in an exam, and she made that very clear to the teachers. Margaret is quite a character, and a force to reckon with when irritated. She has a lot of qualities which make her a really, really good person for her job. The male teachers didn’t seem to know how to react to an older white woman telling them off. It ended up fine, though, because it was arranged for us to teach Class Seven instead.

Senye is very different from Lisori. I’ve said this before, but I think it deserves to be reiterated. The Class Seven we taught (I think it was only one class of the two they have, because there were only 37 or so kids) is extremely spirited, much more so than my Class Eight at Lisori, maybe even to the point of sauciness. Many of them asked for our phone numbers within two hours of meeting us. My Lisori kids never asked for my number, not even after two weeks, not even James, who was the sassiest of them, or Justus, who I think was very fond of me. I prefer it that way; I feel that the Lisorians respected and liked me as a teacher, and didn’t try to exploit our relationship by trying to get me to give them money. Call me hostile, but I felt immediately resentful that the Senye kids wanted my number so soon. I didn’t even know their names, much less anything else about them; I can’t help but think that they see me as a source of wealth, a means to an end. I can’t pull the friendly-smiling-super-duper-nice-teacher act here—these kids need more discipline, a hard look when they aren’t serious in class. There is an arrogance to the sharper ones in the group which I do not like. Bluntly put, I just don’t find the (Class 7) kids at Senye as endearing.

I realise that I am being rather prejudiced in my comparisons. I do not mean to put Lisori on a pedestal or condemn Senye; I will admit that many factors are influencing my perception of the two schools, most of which are personal and selfish. Senye isn’t as detestable as I’m making it sound, and Lisori has plentiful faults of its own. But maybe because Lisori was much smaller, maybe because I was the only Duke student there, maybe because I liked the teachers better, maybe because it was my first school—probably, really, because they really liked me—I just feel a lot more attached to—even possessive about—that class and those kids. Like: they’re mine. Don’t touch. I think I really made some sort of positive impact on them; whereas here at Senye, I don’t think that will be so much the case. It’s my own fault. The prospect of pouring myself into teaching the kids at Senye the way I did the kids at Lisori is just too overwhelming. And since we’ll only be spending a few days with Class Eight (they have divisional exams next week for another two days), I don’t feel like I’ll get to know them well enough to care as much.

Which is very, very unfortunate, because these kids really need somebody to care. My impression is that the general level of education here isn’t quite adequate—the quality of the Class Eight compositions we marked was, honestly, awful, with of course the exception of one or two. The students in the lower grades simply are not able to build a foundation strong enough to work with in the upper grades, when they are told to write full-length compositions. The Class Sevens we taught were severely lacking in fundamental grammar skills: none of them could use speech marks accurately, and things like capital letters, full stops and commas were commonly problematic as well. I don’t know if the two streams in Senye are ability-grouped and if so, if we were leading the less proficient class, but I found it quite disheartening.

The kids are not to blame. There are just far too many students in each class. Some of the lower grades have over one hundred students in the same classroom, squashed together on the bare floor, with only one teacher—fewer, even, because I suspect that the lower-primary teachers show up to class even less often than the upper-primary ones do. There is no way that the pupils are able to ask questions or spend more time going over material they do not understand with the teacher, so they are pretty much left to their own. And how do you learn a foreign language on your own, as a ten-year-old, with no guidance, hardly any resources to speak of, and countless chores to perform every day?

Yet it is not entirely the teachers’ fault either. During our WISERBridge meeting this afternoon, Margaret told us that the public primary school teachers here earn between sh2000 and sh4000 per month—that’s less than US$50—and the ones in the private schools earn even less. Put this way, it isn’t difficult to see why they are so unmotivated. Most of the teachers will look for any opportunity to earn more income, which is why they make the students bring in soda bottles from home for them to sell, and cut firewood for them to use. So the students don’t do well enough to move out of Muhuru Bay, and when they become the next generation of teachers, they act in exactly the same way. It is such an exasperating system. And all really because there is no money.

Such a quandary. How do we possibly get to the root of this?

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.

Senye, First Impressions

New week, new school. For the next two weeks I will be at Senye Primary School with Elizabeth, teaching a class of 53 pupils. It is a very different dynamic from Lisori, and not just because there are so many more students (although that is probably one of the major differences). I am only just beginning to see the pros and cons of Senye, and I do not want to be too hasty to jump to conclusions. I guess I will have to wait and see how much I like it.

Senye is located just beyond Customs, directly opposite Muhuru Junior. It is a large public school of over 1500 students from Classes 1 to 8, split into two streams per grade: Yellow and Green. The timetable is structured identically to Lisori’s, with eight classes and lunch from 12:40p.m. to 2:00p.m. Unlike in Lisori, however, the teachers would leave at the end of their lesson, even if the other teacher had not arrived (and they usually never did). I assume it is because Senye is such a large school and the teachers are required to teach both streams, which means that they must go to both classes—or at least in theory. How much time they spend lounging in the staff room, I have yet to determine.

Senye seemed more prepared for our visit than Lisori was, at least in terms of directing us. When we arrived, we were told by the deputy headteacher, Okich (whom Margaret warned us was a piece of work—always out to get something from us) that they had arranged a reformed schedule for us, with extended periods for the subjects in which they needed the most help. I had pretty much made up my own schedule at Lisori, depending on how well-prepared I was that day. We also did not teach today, apart from a makeshift Maths lesson which we took over when the teacher did not show up twenty minutes into the class (tardiness still appears to be the norm—although it was the second period of the session, so I suppose it is laudable that he showed up at all). Instead, we sat in on all the lessons, at the back, and observed the teachers.

There are a few very quick, enthusiastic ones in the class. I picked up a few names: Olala, the tall boy who sat at the back next to Elizabeth’s chair; Onyango, the tiny boy sandwiched between two others in the middle of the left column; Jane, one of the more active of the girls, in the right column. I do not think I will get as close to the kids at Senye as I did with the ones at Lisori; there are just so many of them, and it will be impossible to learn all their names in two weeks. The classroom is so much more crowded than the one at Lisori, with three columns of desks, three to each desk, pushed so close that the students can lean on the desks behind them. Lisori’s Standard Eight classroom was probably almost the same size, but with more than half the desks empty.

I had actually only observed one class at Lisori, having either taken the lessons alone or left them to the regular teacher’s digression. It was an interesting experience to watch the Senye teachers at work. What I find quite queer and frustrating is the amount of repetition in the class—I had known it was the practice for students to repeat the last word of practically every sentence the teacher uttered, but to see it happening, for several hours with one teacher after another, was something else. It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing. I felt that the teachers also took far too long repeating themselves in paraphrases. The Social Studies lesson went something like this:

TEACHER: Today we are going to learn about urbanization. What are we going to learn about today?

ALL: Urbanization.

TEACHER: Yes, urbanization. Now let me refer to a dictionary for the meaning of “urban”, because the word “urbanization” comes from the word “urban”. Looks through dictionary and reads out the entire entry. Urbanization is when towns grow and develop. The growth and development of towns. Now, somebody tell me the meaning of “urbanization”…

 By the time they got to the main content of the lesson, there would only be ten minutes left. Sometimes I feel that it is a small wonder these kids learn anything at all.

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Senye’s proximity to Customs makes it very suitable for lunchtime shopping. We ran into Katy on Kennedy’s car during lunch break and she commented: “This is very convenient for your avocado habit.” Oh my. Am I that easy to see through? ;)

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Reese and Tara went to Lisori today and brought me back a note from one of my students. I knew before I opened it that it was from Justus. I love that kid so much. His handwriting was so meticulous, and I could tell that he’d taken a lot of care with writing the letter. It made me go all teary again—in fact I’m going teary just thinking about it—I wish I could spend more time with him. He is probably the one who loves me the most, and though I hate to admit to playing favourites it is hard to deny that he is one of mine. I sincerely hope I can see him again. I may ask Margaret for permission to go to Madam Esther’s, because the three students that I wanted to take to the academic competition in WISER all live with her.