The
clouds have cleared up to let the stars shine through a bit….and that’s a good
thing, because the giants of electricity have long since taken the glimmer out
of our lights and lamps, and the stars are the only thing to guide us now. It’s a lonely night, the first in a long
time. Students left, class by class,
until we were left with empty dormitories still echoing with their laughter. Our Pastor and his wife left to grade the national
examination in far away parts of the country.
Their children took the constant pitter-patter of their feet on my
verandah, yelling and warm hugs with them to their grandmother’s. I’m the mama of two large, empty houses now,
a wretched task when all I want is Mama Ivan’s lemongrass chai and one of the
kids on my lap. When we closed our final
staff meeting of the year yesterday, the other teachers weren’t to be seen
again, except in the large rickety buses that took them far away. Now, it’s a big, dark school, cavernous
classrooms and a shockingly quickly overgrown field, and me – with the chance
to reflect on it all.
The
end of the year brought a surprising amount of challenges. For me, the most heart-wrenching is news that
came from some of our girls. In
Tanzania, girls are often under heard and overpowered. Yet, the amount of time I spend advising
girls over steaming cups of chai and plates of fruit, empowering them through
sports, showing them to love themselves through the arts, and encouraging them
to battle gender stereotypes amounts to a full-time job. Through my youth group, many of our small
skits and discussions revolve around gender stereotypes and what we can do to
work toward gender equality in our tiny slice of this world.
Our
students who completed Form Four this year finished their national examinations
in a hurry, collected their things along with signatures of all of their
teachers, and were packed off to their homes.
Or so we like to assume. I was
beyond dismayed to hear that one of the students, a girl in my youth group, decided
to visit her male friend who drives a “boda boda” (motorcycle taxi) in the
village upon leaving school, and found it more comfortable than her own
home. Let’s call her Kalunde for the
purposes of this blog. She is a student
who I was close with, both at school and in my home.
To
my ultimate dismay, I got déjà vu of Kalunde’s story just a few days later,
with yet another girl in my youth group.
We’ll call her Nakunda. This is a
student who had been extremely close with me since my first day teaching,
accompanying me to church and every step of the way. When she could see that my eyes looked
tearful or my smile was gone for a few days, she would speak to our Pastor, or
her friends, and think of a way to cheer me up.
In addition, I did my part to make sure that her time at school was
comfortable. She suffered from a lot of
problems related to her menstrual period, and would miss 4 – 5 days of school
each month as a result. I would find her
in the dormitory on these days, and beg her to sit up, get dressed, and sit
through her classes. Sometimes, I’d even
fill a thermos with soup and take it to her to get her to eat just a bit. When signing passes for Form Four students, I
asked them to imagine where they’d be on this day in one year…then two years,
five years, and ten years, in order to continue the dialogue we had started
about future plans. I’ll never forget Nakunda’s answer to my
question – the usual sparkle in her eyes gone.
In my rapidly improving Swahili, I asked her, “Nakunda, where will you
be on this day next year?” She answered
me, “Only God knows, Madam, only He can help me.”
Two
weeks later, to hear the news that she also decided to stay in our village with
a run-of-the-mill village youth was devastating. I thought back to all those times walking
slowly back from church with her, and her being greeted by all types of people
– very rare for a boarding student at our school who comes from a far away
place.
Here,
each and every student enters my heart.
For students who sleep in our dormitories, far away from their own
parents, we teachers become their parents at school. News from these two girls who had become like
my daughters sent my head spinning out of control. I couldn’t get it out of my head – was it
something that I did? Did those village
walks to our youth group meetings give them the opportunity to make friends
near and far? No, they never left my
sight. Was it the freedom and the ideas I exposed them to? I couldn’t imagine what would make them do
exactly the opposite of what I had taught them through the last year and a half
of their formal education.
And
just like that, school ended. My last
night with students was just our Pre-Form One class, who proved to be a
wonderful, capable group of scholars eager to learn. We played games on the field in the
afternoon, and watched, “Up!” – my all-time favorite movie at night. I hope none of them saw the inevitable
welling of my eyes when I watch this tear-jerker! Then, they wanted to watch the DVD I’d
prepared of our school choirs, followed by dancing to Swahili songs while we
cleaned up until bedtime. Walking them
back to the dormitory, we looked up and gave names to the stars – mine was a
bright, blinking and far-away star that we later concluded was an
airplane. If every star could be a
friend of ours, what a wonderful place the world would be! We tried to count them, and came to the
conclusion that God loves us because he gave us more stars in the sky than we
can possibly count.
And
with the childlike wonder in their eyes engrained in my mind, I closed my own
eyes and went to sleep. My work as a teacher
is to keep that innocent spark alive at all costs, and to try again and again
and once more again, even when the stars closest to me lose their spark and go astray.
