Ladies and gentlemen...

Tusky's has chocolate syrup.

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.

Lucy and Amina: Happy girls with a new calculator

Boys practicing their march thing for morning assembly.

I'll leave you with an awesome sunset I saw over the dining hall at school the other night.

Hope America is well; Kenya is sure hangin' in there. Miss you all like nobody's business.

~ Shub :)

My wonderful deaf kids.

Normally I don't feel like I have anything exciting to blog about, but whether KSL and deaf kids is an interesting topic or not, I want to write about it. My life here revolves around my kids, hopefully for obvious reasons. My daily routine is planned around the first knock on my door in the morning, and the last knock at night. I enjoy every single second I spend with them and I wouldn't have it any other way. Many times I find it hard to actually teach because I have too much fun just chatting with them. Luckily, they are so fantastic that they keep me on track and tell me stop getting distracted and keep teaching.

I was nervous about leaving Kilifi for a month in April - thought maybe being gone for so long I'd forget how to sign or something. Fortunately that wasn't the case, and in fact, I feel like I understand them better than I did before. Obviously the only sure-fire way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it, and thankfully, I love doing that here. I knew throughout my training that there would be a lot of signs at my site that I wouldn't know, because they're specific to just the coast, or just Kilifi, or even just my school. Signs are extremely different depending on where you are in Kenya and there was A LOT that I had to pick up when I first got here. In fact, I'm still picking up new stuff, and probably will till the day I leave. In America if you're deaf and you want to talk to someone, you send them an email, or shoot them a text, or drive to their house, or even fly to them if need be. Communication is easy and affordable (most of the time) and makes it much simpler to develop a standardized, nation-wide sign language. However in the third world (which I think Kenya is definitely on the more developed end of third world) communication is much harder. You can't just hop in your car and head to the next town. It takes a lot of money and effort to get around, and though most Kenyans I've met have cell phones, the deaf schools here have such an issue with language that phones wouldn't do much good for them anyways. So the deaf will find each other, and then stay where they are, completely isolated from the other deaf communities around the country. This means that they develop their own signs for different concepts, but because the English is so poor, have no way of explaining it other than with that sign. Signs are even different from Kilifi to a special school in Mtwapa, which is about a 20 minute drive south. At the primary level, this means too that many kids will come to school with what's called "home signs" meaning they and only they know what that sign means. This is why I'm thankful to be teaching secondary. At least there is some sort of streamline with my kids.

Another thing is that ASL is much more connected to English, an actual spoken language. KSL, at least at my school, is so far removed from any spoken language it can make that language barrier all the more difficult to break down. A lot of signs have an English word that will go along with them, and a lot don't. And the chances of the kids even knowing that English word that they're signing are very slim. Luckily my kids have learned enough that sometimes they can explain to me the concepts behind their signs. So many times though they will be chatting with me and I won't know a sign so I'll ask "that means what?" They have NO idea what it would translate to in English, and are so used to just knowing that that sign means this concept, that they can't explain it to me. They'll just repeat it over and over again. Most of them are learning though that straight repetition doesn't help me understand the sign so they're figuring out examples to use and I can pick up on context clues too. Many times too they'll spell a word that when put with the sign, doesn't seem quite right. So I inquire more and try to give them the right word when I finally understand their concept. For example what was originally spelled "mercy" to me actually means something more like patience and tolerance and chilling out. What was first spelled as "doubt" or "between" I understand now as complete indecision. What's funny though is that as my sign vocabulary is expanding, so too are the signs I completely and totally understand in context, but still can't figure out how to accurately express in English. When people come to visit me I obviously act as interpreter for my kids, and when visitors ask "What did he just say?" it's sometimes really hard for me to verbalize, even though I understood exactly what was signed. That still blows my mind.

On the same token, half my time spent with them is basically charades for me. They ask me so many different English words that I would have no idea in hell what they're signs are so I just act it out. Many times too they'll ask me a word and the first meaning I think of is what I explain. But then I think, wait what's the context? So I ask them where they saw it. If they can show me the book or explain it a little then I get a better idea of the context. Today Baraka asked me what "tipping" meant. The first thing that popped into my head was the physical tipping, so I slowly knocked over a water bottle. But then when I read it in the book he had, it was actually talking about tipping at a restaurant or something. This happens ALL the time. They're still figuring out the concept of "context" itself, but they're definitely getting better. Also, I had an inkling of this before, but they just informed me today that when I first started teaching in January they only understood a fraction of what I was signing. Thus it's totally a two-way street to that whole "mutual understanding" stuff.

Another thing I think I'm getting better at, on the receptive end of sign language, is actually understanding their stories as a whole. When I initially got to site and was first getting to know them, I was constantly thinking about the fact that they were signing to me, and like I've mentioned before, I would just get caught up in the beauty of it. But now that I mostly know how each and every one of them signs, it's much easier for me to focus on their story, rather than the physical act of sign language. I've also found that it's way easier to not try and translate their signing into English in my head. If I try to put a word with every sign, nothing will make sense. So if I just focus on the story itself rather than the individual signs, my understanding goes through the roof.

Like I said, I enjoy every moment I'm with them and want more than anything to see them not get HIV and not become matatu drivers and not feel like they are any lesser just because they are deaf. Some of them are so bright and so motivated, some are just fun to talk to, and every single one of them is goofy beyond measure. Solomon loves pretending I understand his Kiswahili when he mumbles to me. Sabastian has a different noise with every sign he does. Sofia and Rehema loooove math and are super smart, and Boni wants to trades me 10 cows for my computer. Emmanuel teaches me Kiswahili and Giriama, Jumaa giggles at everything, and Amir tells me he definitely wants to marry a mzungu like me. Amina has the most infectious laugh, Paul has one incredibly beautiful blue eye and a ridiculous amount of patience, and Catherine just thinks I'm nuts and tells me all the time. Gona and Osman are two peas in a pod and love letting me in on their stories. Stephen has the biggest brightest smile you'll ever see, Shukurani is just gorgeous all around, and Francis does a fantastic Mr. Bean impression. Can you tell I could go on? Truly they are the best part of Peace Corps. How will I ever leave?

I guess that's all I had in my head for now. Hopefully my and my kids' understandings of each other will only continue to improve and hopefully when I do actually HAVE to leave I'll be able to tear myself from their side. Or maybe I'll just stay :) I send my love to the States and everyone there and my kids send their love as well. They would all give their left arm to go to America if they had the chance.

Cheers and ninakukosa!

~ Shub :)

P.S. my new baby paka has been climbing my curtains like in cartoons and is getting much better at catching mosquitoes. She loves sitting on the computer when I'm trying to type and sitting on the cutting board when I'm trying to cook. Oh well.

Happy Weekend!