a week here already? that’s insane. it never ceases to amaze me how fast time goes here, and yet sometimes the days are so slow. I’ve got right back into understanding and knowing the whole ‘africa time’ thing, I had to get used to that pretty fast. here, things will happen as they will; no point rushing or trying to fasten them up, everything is just pole pole… slowly slowly.
anyway, this week has been busy and honestly, it’s been pretty tiring. I forgot how hard it is being on your a-game at school all the time, trying to control 75 kids and trying to speak the very little swahili I remember.
breakfast of sweet bananas purchased from the carts on the side of the road. these are the world’s best bananas, I’m australian and ‘apparently’ we grow great bananas but they ain’t got shit on these kenyan bad boys. breakfast might also be peanut butter on toast, or a few cups of tea, or milo, or really good honey wheat puffs I got from the local market.
I head off to school between 9:30/10am and it’s about a 5-10 minute walk (depends how many people shout out at me or try to walk with me or yell and tell me to go back to my country; if that happens, it might be shorter than 5 minutes)
the rooms on the first level on the left is where the school is
a poster I made last time
I walk into the compound, up the stairs, along the walk way and into the ‘apartment’ where the school is and greet evelyn, then walk into thunderous cheers by both the baby/nursery class and the pre-unit class… every single morning without fail I walk into a huge “yay!!” from them all. by the time I arrive, the kids have usually had their first lesson of the day and it’s time to do some marking. I sit across from evelyn at her ‘desk’ (table in the middle of the first room) and start marking. lessons could be joining the dots for letters “a b c” that we’d written in their bikes the day before to prepare for today, or it could be them copying patterns from the board, or writing numbers 1 to 20 in their books. this is no easy feat for the baby/nursery class as they’re as young as 2 years old in there, so poking someone in the arm with a grey lead pencil is more fun than learning how to hold it and write the number 8 – especially when you’re two years old.
once the marking is done, it’s usually time for uji – the porridge made of millet, corn meal and sorghum flour, and occasionally the mix has rye flour and/or oats. it’s really thick in texture and sweetened with a lot of sugar! for 75 kids, we usually go through 50kg of sugar in one month!! The uji itself is sort of purple and sludgy, but it’s really good for the kids, really filling and quite nutritious. we say our prayers, and everybody takes their porridge. except for us teachers, we take chai (which when I was here last, did used to be tea but now we take boiled milk and hot chocolate powder) and mandazi (deep fried unsweetened dough).
biscuits as a treat!
next we do another lesson. it could be anything from making things from modelling clay or colouring in or singing songs, and then writing homework off the board into the homework books. this time is usually quite hectic as the kids now have a whole lot of energy from their uji, whereas sometimes of a morning they can be quite sluggish as many may not have had anything to eat since lunchtime yesterday at school. it’s hard work, particularly trying to keep 37 kids under the age of 5 in a 3m x 4m room settled and not jumping on tables too much.
lunchtime is great as everyone gets a bowl of something hot, filling and delcious for lunch. it could be ugali and sukuma wiki (boiled corn flour and cooked kale), rice and beans, rice and brown beans or githeri (corn and bean stew). this is something that I started when I was first here in 2013, when the school had been forgotten about, ignored and dumped by its american founder. many of the kids may only receive very little dinner at home – if anything at all – so it’s good being able to fill their bellies as best we can at school. we say our prayers again, and time to eat. this is usually the quietest moment of the whole day; except for yesterday being friday, they were all a little crazy.
plates for everyone
ugali and sukuma wiki. in my opinion, the worst meal. proves I’ll never be a good kenyan
more songs or maybe some colouring after lunch and it’s already time to put put the homework books in their backpacks and get ready to head home. mums, dads or guardians come to the school to pick up their kids as its too dangerous for them to walk alone in certain places or too far to walk alone. the last job of the day is to administer any medications that certain kids need. it’s the school who takes the kids to the doctor if they fall ill, not the parents, so part of the monthly upkeep of the school is also to allow for doctor visits, prescriptions and medications.
so many funny things happen in between all of this though. one of the little boys, franklin, cried on my first day as I was a different person and I wasn’t anna. but the next day, when I was teaching the kids to do thumbs up, he couldn’t stop smiling and doing thumbs up – so much so that our thumbs had to touch. whenever the kids have a problem, they always run up to Evelyn and say “teacher, teacher, ………..” and then explain the issue in swahili. I love it though when they run to me and try and tell me what the matter is, in swahili, and then look at me with their big beautiful eyes waiting for me to fix the issue, to respond in some way. to them I’m just the same as them, I’m another human so I must speak the language they speak. It’s the kids that make me love being here, not the adults. the pure innocence of children; they remind us that love is universal and that we are born to love and respect each other.
unfortunately as everyone grows, attitudes change – particularly towards people of a different colour as I as reminded yesterday. it happened the last time I was here, and again yesterday. walking home from school with anna, shelby and her baby braelyn, some random guy shouted across the road that us ” mzungus should go back to our own countries”. sarcastic or not, that’s the behaviour that frustrates me to no end when I’m in kenya. mate trust me, I can see for myself that my skin colour is quite different to yours but can you imagine if we reciprocated that kind of behaviour at home? the court cases, the defamation, the slander and racism. it’s not tolerated there, and I most certainly wouldn’t shout out “black guy” to one of the many sudanese people we have in melbourne, so I don’t understand why shouting out mzungu is okay here. I hated it last time – for six months I hated it – and guess what? I’m back and I hate it just as much. the kids on the street who call out mzungu is acceptable because why? kids don’t know any better. but adults? no. I vividly remember as a kid if I saw someone who “looked different”, mum always told me and my sister not to stare but here, staring is all kenyans in what to do when someone ‘different’ walks past.
though after this rant – and I can remember writing something like this last time I was here, I remember it like it was yesterday – I still wish I wasn’t leaving Kenya in less than a week.
travelling alone 