Bill

I was expecting a visit from the three Lisori kids today, so I didn’t make any other plans. Unfortunately, they never called, and the number they'd used yesterday was out of service. I’m a little disappointed but not upset at them—I don’t really know anything about the dynamics of that family, and for all I know they could be mistreated. I really hope they were studying for their exams tomorrow though.

Instead, I worked on my blog entries all day, ate a lot, and went to look at Joy’s phoenix mural in the computer lab. It is absolutely stunning. I’m actually jealous. I have not painted for so long, I don’t think I could do it anymore!

At a little after 3p.m., two of the WISER girls, Faith and Florence, came into the dining room where I was working. I spent the rest of the afternoon talking with them, showing them my photos, and teaching them to use e-mail and Facebook. Faith is from Lwanda. She asked me to greet them when I go to see them at the WISERBridge exams. I’m looking forward to going in the next three days—I want to see the kids again, and cheer them on. It’s the least I can do to let them know I’m still thinking of them. Also, it feels quite awesome to go to an exam when I’m not the one who needs to sit the papers. :D

I went down to the market at Tagache at five to get some vegetables and fruits. When I got back to WISER, Joy was just leaving with Bill and Caston, the two Shining Star kids she is close to, to “go see the German musungu girls” who were teaching at Shining Star. They'd just arrived a week ago and were staying with the director of the school. Of course, once I heard that I felt compelled to go as well—gotta check out the new blood and all that, you know. We walked down and turned off the main road by Shining Star to go to the compound where the girls were living. The director was building a new house for himself right by the school building, and as we walked past Bill excused himself and said he needed to speak quickly with his uncle. It turned out that his uncle is the director himself. I don’t know Bill very well, and I’ve become so accustomed to hearing about these extended family relationships that I wasn’t really surprised at the news, but Joy seemed shocked. The director came out to greet us and invited us to tour his unfinished house, quite a grand one too. He is currently still living at his mother’s compound, which is why Bill is with them too.

The walk to Bill’s compound was very scenic and cool, because the path was bordered on both sides by some of the tallest trees I’d seen here in Muhuru Bay. The compound itself was very comfortable too, with a large, open space surrounded by trees and several mud huts—I don’t know if they were well-off, but it was clearly a large family. Bill introduced us to his aunts but there were just too many children running around. The German girls were somewhat of a disappointment—they didn’t seem very eager to become acquainted, and only one of them came to talk to us. They are only here for one more week, and then they leave for safari in Nairobi and fly back from Mombasa. I was surprised that she had no idea what I was talking about when I asked her how they felt about being called musungu; it makes me think that they haven't been out in the community much by themselves.

It was only when we were back at WISER that Joy told me about Bill’s family. His mother left when he was younger, and his father has too many other wives and children to look after him. He lives with his uncle, who is also polygamous, and is treated like the Cinderella of the family—made to do the dishes, clean up, finish manual jobs. Joy said that he had so much work to do that often by the time he is done in the morning, school is half over, and it is a wonder that Bill manages to stay at the top of the class with the amount of school that he misses. I realised that this was why Joy had seemed so surprised to hear that Bill’s uncle is the director; it means that he knows how often Bill is absent from class.

Bill wants to be an accountant. His favourite subject is Mathematics, which is also his best friend Caston’s favourite subject, and the two of them help each other in classes. He is also very, very humble. He wouldn’t admit himself that he was the top student in Shining Star and told us to ask Castor instead. When Joy asked him how he managed to do so well in the exams, he said, “God helps me, I think.” But Bill won’t be able to go to secondary school if he has to pay anything for it. His uncle won’t give him the money, and he would have to find some measly-paying manual work around Muhuru Bay, and probably be chained here for the rest of his life. And those wonderful qualities of his—they would all go to waste.

There are only three WISERBridge boys’ scholarships, and it’s pretty certain that Derek from Winjo is going to get one of them. As much as she hopes that Bill can get one, we know that there are many more than three needy, intelligent boys in Muhuru Bay, all of whom could do so much with a full-ride scholarship. I completely agree that as a whole the girls here are far more in need of financial incentive than the boys are, but kids are kids—they deserve an education, regardless of what their genders are, regardless of how wealthy their family is. Why must so many conditions be met, so many things be considered, before a child is allowed to go to school?

Because It Seems So Unfair

These kids break my heart. Some are almost as old as I am, but our lives have been so different that it makes me want to cry. I do not know for certain why, and I hate that I feel this way—I should not—I have no right—it isn’t appropriate. I will admit that at least part of the reason why I tear up is out of pity, and pity is not something I should be feeling for these people who are so much stronger than I am.

Yet pity I do feel—and oh! Such a pity!—for these kids. Not to receive the education they deserve, not to be given the chances they need not to be able to become what they can be! They have dreams and hopes and ambitions just like any other children in the world, and the only reason why most of them cannot achieve these dreams is because they were born here, in this abysmal poverty, instead of in a Global North country or a well-off family. The kids in Muhuru Bay—or, indeed, in any destitute corner of the world— are no less intelligent than the kids anywhere else. They are, for the most part, simply less educated. For no fault of their own.

Sherryl said that she started WISER because of moral outrage. She was so angry at the unfairness of the situation here that she had to do something about it, and so she found the money to build WISER. But she also said that there is a difference between building a building and building a school, and seeing the education system here has made me realise how very, very true this is. These kids are all enrolled in school, yes, but are they really learning? How often do they actually attend, and when they do, for how long are they actually in class, with a teacher? Do they have books to look at, people to turn to if there is something they don’t understand? And the teachers—how qualified are they? Most are severely underpaid, and many of the ones at private schools are Form 4 graduates who have not gone to teacher training college. Some of the English that they use is improper, or at least awkward to my Westernised ears. I hesitate before I underline some of the clumsy phrases in their compositions, because if this is the way that the adults speak, then how are the kids supposed to know any better?

No, it is not the buildings which make the school, it is the people. Sherryl has put together a very dedicated team at WISER, albeit at a cost. None of the teachers are from around Muhuru Bay, all were educated beyond university, and several hail from Nairobi or other sizeable cities. Most of them are truly lovely, lovely people (like Teacher Violet, who just seems really nice, for lack of a more suitable word).They also receive considerable salaries for agreeing to come and live here. Unfortunately, the primary school teachers do not have the same incentive.

The money, the money! It is not a problem that can be solved solely with money, but more of that stuff would certainly help!

Day One of Teaching and a Birthday, Muhuru Style!

It has been an incredibly busy day, and I feel exhausted even though I have not actually done very much. I woke up this morning at 5:45a.m. when my alarm went off in order to go for a run, but ended up lying in bed for twenty minutes as the sun was not yet up and even I am not crazy enough to run outside in the dark. Sunrise appears to be at about 6:30a.m. here—I will keep that in mind for next time. By the time I returned I barely had enough time to shower and get dressed for the WISER assembly at 7:30, in honour of the principal Madam Dorcas. She had been scheduled to arrive back from her son’s Master’s Graduation in Nairobi in time for our arrival, but had been delayed due to the death of a relative.

After the assembly we were immediately whisked off by Margaret into the car to head to our respectively schools. She accompanied us to each school and introduced us to the head teacher. Elizabeth was right around the corner at Shining Star; then Leonard at Memorial right in Customs; then Adria at Muhuru Junior; Frank all the way down the point of the peninsula at Nyangwayo; then finally me, at Lisori.

It was a long, long trip to Lisori. In terms of distance, Nyangwayo is the furthest away, but in terms of travelling time Lisori definitely takes the cake. We actually had to double back past Customs and go off the main road, into a swampy area which, as Margaret put it, gives “a whole new meaning to potholes.” There was no “road,” just tracks amongst the grass which the car fought to follow. I could not tell where we were going—it looked the same to me no matter which direction I looked—but somehow Kenneth, our driver, maneouvered his way around. Lisori is but a stone’s throw away from the Tanzanian border, so close that I could see buildings which belonged to Tanzania from the car.

Margaret took me to see Madam Esther, the school principal. She was a very well-groomed lady, but then again most Kenyan ladies I have met are well-groomed. Margaret openly admitted to me that she and Esther do not get along, because Esther is often absent from school. True to Margaret’s words, an hour or two after I arrived, Esther left for Mgori.

But that was not the only surprise.

There were 18 students today in my class of Standard Eight. I introduced myself, telling them I was from Hong Kong, that I now go to Duke, that I had a brother who was younger and taller. They laughed at that. One of the girls sitting in the front put her hand up and asked me if both my parents were alive. I should have realized then, but it still didn’t fully strike me how very different the lives of these students were from ours. I asked them then to take turns telling me about their families—and so many of them had only one parent left. Usually it was the father who had passed away, and the mother would be left to look after a family with five or six children. Probably why many of the students in the class were the youngest of their families—they need to rely on their older siblings to support their school fees.

I hadn’t expected to be teaching today—it was meant for observation and orientation—so it was a bit of a shock to find out that I would be in charge of several classes. Caught by surprise and completely unprepared, I flailed about (mentally) in desperation and ended up asking them to write a story on the board. Each person was supposed write a sentence and pass it on to the next. I started first: “This morning I woke up to a beautiful sunrise…” A nice, safe sentence, or so I thought. I did not foresee the way it would turn out: the mother ended up dying of malaria.

I had lunch with the teachers—it was steamed corn and tea with cocoa. I had some of the corn (it was much like home) but did not like the tea much as it was far too sweet. I actually had brought my own lunch, but did not like to refuse their food as it means so much to them when visitors share a meal. Several local people have told me that offering food to guests is the pillar of Kenyan hospitality.

It makes me uncomfortable to see how much non-academic work the students are made to do. They fetch water for the teachers, cook their lunch, run to buy them food from the nearby vendor, chop firewood…anything they are bid to do. They seem almost more like servants than students.

I have also begun to experience the effects of the so-called “Kenyan time”. The school day at Lisori is divided into eight 35-minute classes, or four sessions of two classes each, with a break between every session and lunch from 12:40 to 2:00. Often, though, the teacher for the second class in a session would not bother showing up, as the first class would start only ten or fifteen minutes after schedule. To my great surprise it also seems the norm for teachers simply not to show up to class. The students seem very used to it. Ten minutes after class was supposed to start, when I asked them where their teacher was, they answered: “He’s not coming.”At first I was confused—what do you mean, not coming?—but by the end of the day I’d realised that it was exactly what they meant. The teachers do not come. Simply, they do not show up. It seems to be quite a regular occurrence here.

Usually, whenever the teachers go AWOL, the students would just sit in the classroom and occupy themselves. But now that I was there, of course I couldn’t just let them sit without a teacher. So I had to take the lessons which were unsupervised. With absolutely zero preparation, however, I was needless to say in a very tricky situation. I simply did not have enough material to spin out over the four hours and twenty minutes during which I was in charge of the class (the kids told me it was okay for them to skip the breaks—that would never happen back home!). I had no idea what they had already covered, what the book taught, or what would be required of them for the exam. When I tried to teach Energy, the kids looked bored out of their minds, especially as I quickly ran out of examples to tell them: these kids have never been in an elevator, never even had electricity before. How do I teach Physics without any props? There had always been so many demonstrations during the science classes I had taken. They have none of that. They have very little of anything, except a desire to make it out of this dismal poverty.
---
It was Leonard’s birthday today, so we sang Happy Birthday during dinner and Frank tried (unsuccessfully) to pour a bottle of water over Leonard’s head. The girls loved it. I think it is good for them to see girls and boys as equals, and to see that we can laugh together and make fun of each other without causing any harm. Leonard is a darling amongst the students. They lured him on a walk after dinner, so that the rest of us could prepare something for him. Some of the Duke girls made a cake, using a kerosene stove they borrowed from Abigail, cake mix, and whatever ingredients were handy (think licorice sticks, chocolate peanut butter, and crumbled Chips Ahoy). It turned out to be a very interesting cake, but Leonard loved it (I’m sure he had to; it was so full of WISER love!)