My school is officially closed. We were informed a few days ago that Kibarani (the primary school where I live, and where the kids eat and spend all other time outside the classroom) doesn't have enough money to keep feeding my secondary kids for the rest of the week. Luckily, exams are finished, so closing early is not a big deal. I spent yesterday finishing my marking and compiling grades, and attempting to talk to a BUNCH of my kids parents.
Since my kids (all but 3) can't hear a darn thing, they have to have to have someone else talk with their parents. Round about the time school is closing the kids all start realizing they have no money to get home. Kenya has this wonderful thing called m-pesa, which is essentially banking through your phone; you can send money back and forth, buy airtime for your phone or for internet, and even do all that stuff to someone else's phone from yours, and it's totally free to use. It's pretty genius. I just got an m-pesa account this term, and I'm not sure why I didn't get one sooner. BUT now that I have it, my phone gets passed around school like it's its job. First the kids will come up to me and ask me to call their parents. The first question I ask is whether or not they need money. If the answer is yes, the next question I ask is whether or not their parents know English. Some of the parents I know have decent enough English because I've spoken to them before, but most I have no idea. My kids say "Yeah! They know English!" Fine. So I call. Annnnnnd I get nowhere, because all I hear on the other line is Kiswahili. If I greet them in Kisawhili (which I've totally got down after 9 months), they start rambling. The conversation usually goes nowhere, because they don't know English, and my Kiswahili is so limited (kidogo sana!), so we hang up and I realize I probably shouldn't have believed the DEAF kid about which languages their parents speak. How would they know? The next thing I do is get one of my half-ers. I have three boys who are fluent in Kiswahili and their mothertongue and all that stuff, and can hear fairly well out of at least one ear. Emmanuel is Form 2, and Alii and Francis are Form 3. Francis is my fellow interpreter when we have outside people come in for Guidance and Counseling sessions, Alii is my head boy, and Emmanuel is my at-site Kiswahili teacher. They're wonderful. So they begrudgingly use my phone to call other kids' parents and ask for money. The money is sent to my phone through m-pesa, I use it for internet, and I give my kids cash out of my pocket. It's a pretty hilarious process, but it works.
So Saturday I head to Nairobi with four of my girls, one of my teachers, and 10 other people (deaf girls, teachers, and other PCV's) from the coast. We'll spend Saturday night in Nairobes and then we have private shuttles from our hotel in NRB to the center outside Kisumu where we'll have camp for the week. Camp GLOW is going to be jam-packed with life lessons and meeting new people, and I'm pretty sure my girls have NO idea how much they are going to enjoy themselves. Only a fraction of my kids have even been off the coast before, so this will be an awesome experience for them.
I, on the other hand, am quite nervous. As a camp counselor (which is no big deal) I have to teach a couple lessons during camp (also no big deal). BUT I realize more and more that 85 - 90% of the signs I use in normal conversation now I learned here, in Kilifi, at school. There was so much I didn't know when I get here, because the signing I learned in training was not the signing that exists on the coast. Seven months into it, talking to my kids and teaching them is not an issue, but that's with MY kids. I'm only going to have four of my kids there; the rest will be Deaf from all over Kenya, and probably won't understand a thing I say. Sadly, though, these kids are taught from an early age (especially the deaf ones) to never speak up if they don't understand, to just sit quietly and take it. Rote memorization is the name of the game, and participatory interactive activities are far and few between.
(Side note: One of my girls in Form 2, who I'm coincidentally taking to camp, asked me the other day if I had ever seen a Deaf teacher walk into a hearing classroom and starting teaching in sign language to a bunch of hearing kids who don't understand sign language. That's absurd right? She phrased it differently and I wasn't quite sure where she was going with it at first, but she asked again and I figured it out. These kids want so bad to understand and are so hungry for information. There is so much they don't know, because it has never been properly explained to them. And in a few short years time they have to take the most important exam of their lives. But how are they supposed to do that when all their teachers do is talk at them?)
OK, back to the story. The point is even if the girls don't understand me, because they come from a different part of Kenya, they will probably still tell me they understand. It's taken most of my kids the better part of two terms to realize if they ask me questions and tell me they don't get it, that I won't get mad. No problem! So I try to explain it a different way. Sometimes it takes twice as long, and I always walk out of the classroom thinking I would need 15 years to teach these kids everything they need to know for that exam, but at least they're understanding something.
What elseee..... Oh! I just got a call from my Peace Corps peeps in Nairobi to ask if I want to be a part of planning the up-coming Pre-Service Training for the new Education group coming to Kenya in October. Hooray! I am thrilled and thoroughly honored that they asked. Right now, out of around 150-ish volunteers in Kenya, three of us are Secondary Deaf-Ed volunteers. The rest of the Education volunteers teach at either secondary hearing schools, or primary deaf schools. BUT we are supposed to have 2 new Secondary Deaf Ed-ers coming in with the next group (YES!). I've also heard, from Peace Corps and even from some of my kids, that there are a bunch of new Secondary Deaf Schools cropping up all over the country. How cool is that? So I head back to Nairobi on the 21st of August to meet up with my awesome Peace Corps staff, and a couple other PCVs to hash out the plans for the upcoming PST. I can't wait. This also means I will once again have access to really good Ethiopian and Thai food, I can buy contact solution, and I can go see Harry Potter :)
On a creepier note, I recently discovered something (or a lot of things) that reminded me once again that I live in Africa. I came home one evening from dinner, and thank GOODNESS I left my outside light on, or I would have walked right into a swarm of thousands and thousands of ants at the base of my front door. My house is essentially just a big cement block and in no way sealed from the outside, and there's only one door, so I felt a little stuck for a minute. They were all different sizes, brown and reddish, and very shiny. There were also these HUGE ones being carried by the smaller one that I later learned are called sausage flies, because their abdomens are giant and wriggling and gross. They were everywhere, and blocking everything just well enough that I had to get close to them to open the door. So I did, terrified. Maybe these are those ants that can eat people or something! So I finally got inside, shut the kittens in my bedroom, put on my rainboots, grabbed the broom, the bottle of insect killer, and got into attack mode. I sprayed and swept for about 10 minutes, because they just kept coming out of the walls. Thankfully it was after dark, and late enough that all my kids had gone to preps, so no one could see how ridiculous I looked. I bet it was pretty ridiculous though. So I finished my killing spree and quickly got on google to figure out what these guys were. I think I typed in "swarm of ants in Africa" or something and the second hit down was an exact picture of my new found friends. Turns out they are called safari ants, driver ants, or siafu in Kiswahili. Check it out here. Apparently, during the rainy season, they leave their hill and migrate to a place where they can find food. They form these giant marching columns, which are easily avoided, if you can move, and if the column doesn't pass through your house. AWESOME. If something does get in their path, they will do everything they can to defend themselves, which really just means they'll eat you. I read other stories online about how people in villages in the Congo actually have to evacuate their homes, or be eaten alive. Any animals inside the house will surely be eaten. So as you can imagine, this made me feel really comfortable. It's not over. The next night I had to go out again, and when I came home, they were back, but this time they had doubled in number. For a split second I thought 'I have GOT to take a picture of this, no one is going to believe me,' then the realization that they were swarming inside the house hit me, and I started panicking; maybe they had eaten the kittens? So I got inside, saw the kittens were still alive, and sprayed and swept all over again, this time for even longer. Two nights was enough for me. The next day I went to town and bought this vermin powder stuff they have and threw a whole bunch in the holes where they were coming from. Thankfully I haven't seen them since, and hopefully never will again. The rainy season is nice because everything cools down, but there certainly are more bugs than I expected.
So two terms down, and four to go. Peace Corps spent a lot of training telling us our first three months at site would be the hardest, and everything else after that is a piece of cake. Strangely, I seem to be doing things backwards. My first term teaching was amazing. This past second term though was a LOT tougher than I expected, but for the weirdest reasons. I definitely cried a lot more in Term 2, and definitely had more thoughts about going home in Term 2, but I promised these kids two years, and I have to deliver. No one said this would be easy right? It just seems so often that it's hard for all the wrong reasons. I know now it's not the material things from America that I miss, it's the aspects of peoples' personalities, and things like a sense of priority, work ethic, and accountability. I'm learning more and more about how to 'play the game' here and how essential it is to my success as a volunteer. Hopefully this term was and will be the hardest, and hopefully things will only get easier. Time will tell right?
Ok, I'm exhausted and need some sleep. Miss you all like never before. Did I tell you I'm coming home for Christmas?
:)
Cheers!
~ Shub :)
