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.
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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!)