The California (Africa!) Initiative: Kittens, kids, and school supplies.

I think I've said this before, but sometimes it still blows me away that I live on the coast of East Africa, and teach the best kids in the world, in another language, by myself; and sometimes, all the ridiculous crap that can happen on a daily basis seems SO absolutely normal.

It's about Week 5 of Term 2, and things are busy as ever. I'm now teaching Physics to Forms 1 and 2, along with Math to Forms 2 and 3, Computers to all three Forms, and Life Skills to everyone altogether on the weekends. That comes to about 30 lessons per week. I think most education volunteers end up teaching close to 25. For me it's hard to count though. The timetable is changed all the time and there are SO many classes where the other teachers just don't teach, so I'll go in instead. It's probably more like a million classes per week, but whatevs; the more time I get with the kids the better.

Speaking of which, they're still awesome. I wrote before about how they always ask me about English words and what they mean. There's no signs for most of them so I do a lot of acting and charades and stuff. The only problem is they understand when I explain it, but promptly forget when I move on to the next word. So I've been doing a little incentive situation. All the words they ask me throughout the week I keep track of, and on Friday if they can accurately explain the words back to me, they get candy. If the word has two meanings, I give them TWO pieces of candy. MAN does it work well. Those kids will do anything for a little bit of sugar. They deserve it though. Uji (porridge), ugali, and bone stew can get pretty tiresome after a while.

One of the words they asked me a few weeks ago was 'engage.' I told them that word had three meanings (that they needed to worry about at least). The first was to start a car, or a piki piki, or a tuk tuk or something. The second is when a teacher is engaging to the students. And the third meaning just killed them. I prefaced it by asking what happens in Kenya when a man wants to marry a woman. They said it either depends on some sort of money or livestock. Fair enough. So I went on to do this whole play/scenario thing about what happens in America when a man wants to marry a woman. The concept of dating and knowing someone for years before marriage is so foreign to them, but I think I sort of got my point across. When I pretended to be the girl getting proposed to they totally flipped. They thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Which maybe it is, I guess.

So me explaining English words takes up a lot of time at school. Sometimes I have trouble keeping to my actual lesson because the questions they ask seem so fundamentally important that I need to explain them. I always have to make fast decisions about what's more important in the long run: logarithms, or whether dinosaurs are alive or not. Last week one of my Form 1's pointed to one of my posters of the solar system and said "Which planet is America on?" In total shock I replied "America?!" "Yeah," he said. "When you fly home to America which planet do you fly to?" This led to Physics being changed to an interplanetary geography lesson, including rockets and astronauts and walking on the moon. They also always ask me if things they see on TV or in books are true or false, e.g. Spiderman, Karate Kid, and Cinderella. It's hard for them to process that not everything on the television is real life. Last week two of my Form 2 boys who sit next to each other got in a big fight. This led to a life lesson on 'being civil' to one another, even if you don't like a person (something that I'm getting better and better at in Kenya). Moral of the story is I usually feel that, in the grand scheme of things, the life lessons are more important than the other lessons, and I'm sticking to that.

And speaking of life lessons, I normally teach Life Skills on Saturday mornings after tea break, which usually works pretty well because the kids are just supposed to have "preps" which means they sit around and recopy the notes they've never understood from the beginning. I figured this time would be better spent learning about HIV and stuff. So for various reasons we haven't actually gotten to do Life Skills yet. It takes a few weeks for all the kids to get back to school and then two weeks ago I had other important stuff to take care of on Saturday. So this past weekend I was really looking forward to Life Skills, and so were the kids. Just before tea break on Saturday some of them stopped at my door and said there was a problem and we'd have to postpone again. I did some investigating and for reasons I don't need to get into I was pretty fuming for most of the morning. Long story short it turns out manual labor on the school grounds is MUCH more important than Life Skills. So be it. I tried to reschedule for Sunday but the kids like to relax and watch TV, which I can totally understand because it's like the only time during the week they get to relax. Hopefully we can do it this Thursday. Such is life in Kenya.

On a different note, I've still been getting some awesome donations from wonderfully generous people back at Christ Episcopal Church in Rockville, MD. Thank you thank you THANK YOU. I've now purchased 47 Math books, 13 English books, 30 scientific calculators, 9 Physics books and 3 big classroom meter rulers. Unfortunately for my kids, my parents are leaving for a 4-month long cruise on their boat soon, so I won't be able to get any deposits into my account till they get back, but we're definitely better off than we were before. Because of this, my kids are slowly learning that not everyone is rich, but if people do have money, they can be unbelievably generous with it. :)

Here's some happy kids with some brand new school supplies!

(Form 3's)

Form 2's

and Form 1's

They all send BIG thank you's to their donors in America; namely Laurie Hoffman, Kathy Mottla, Barbara Cano, Bobbie Power and Christ Church Outreach Committee. You guys are AWESOME.

In other news, last weekend I went with 6 of my kids to Mombasa, where there's an awesome church that accommodates the deaf. Mombasa has a fairly substantial deaf community and it was really cool to interact with a lot of them. There are a couple preachers at this church who are deaf as well. My kids had practiced signing some gospel songs to do at the service and after insisting a lot that I didn't want to stand at the podium and interpret for the entire congregation (I was already stared at enough for being the only white person within a 5km radius), I quite enjoyed myself. Also, there were like 6 other interpreter-type people there anyways, so I wasn't being a total jerk, I promise. Anyways, the service lasted numerous hours, as church services in Africa do, and afterwards we all headed upstairs to get lunch. They fed us beans and pilau and cabbage, and my boys ate their little hearts out. I met some awesome deaf people, some that live in Mombasa, and some in Kilifi. All in all, it was a good day and a pretty neat experience. Here's some photographic evidence:

(A little blurry cuz obvi they're dancing and stuff)

Sometimes I just wish I blended in.

From left to right: Gona, Osman, Apolinary, Tabitha, Monica,

Lucy, and some random kid I don't know. Lucy is doing my

sign name and "I love you."

Ok, switching gears. Remember how I got a kitten as soon as I got back to Kilifi a few weeks ago? Well one of my girls Joyce had mentioned before that she would maybe bring me a cat from home when we all got back from break. I promptly forgot about this and Joyce took a few weeks to get back to school. When she did come, she showed up holding a box with a little hole on top. "What's in there?" I said. "It's your kitten you wanted!" OH MAN. So now I have two. My new one is a little orange marmalade and much more of a street kitty than the first. He had tons of fleas and ticks and scars when he first showed up, and he's got this funny broken tail, but he's a total sweetheart. I've named them Marie and Toulouse and though I would love to add a Berlioz to the family, I don't think my Peace Corps stipend can support 3 kittens. Anywho, the two of them are totally crazy, they have the run of the house, and they love my kids. Here's some very atypical cute time (most of the time they're screaming for food and scaling my mosquito net and trying to bite each other's ears off):

Life is moving along, tough as it can be sometimes. I can get so unbelievably frustrated with people, to the point where I actually have to go and cool down somewhere, but then I spend one class with my kids and they make me forget why I was even mad in the first place. I don't think they realize how much they mean to me. So I'm good; Kenyans drive me crazy more often than I'd like but I'm happy and healthy don't have much reason to complain :) More proof:

Mwavu was trying to make me giggle during assembly.