My First Day of School

Monday, May 18
Today, I went to volunteer at Hekima School, just a 20-minute walk away. The school has nursery age through Grade 8, at which point the students take a national exam that determines which college (high school) they qualify to attend.

I was assigned to help Teacher Charity, who teaches English and French (how perfect, right?). The first class I went to with her was English for Class (grade) 4. They were learning about adjectives. There were quite a few pupils (you’re a ‘pupil’ through Class 8, then you become a ‘student’) who hadn’t done their homework from Friday, so Teacher Charity was lecturing them on that. Then she started asking individual pupils what they want to be when they grow up.

--“A doctor.”

--“A doctor? You think doctors are lazy? No, they have to work hard. And it starts
here. If you’re a doctor, you’ll get homework from the hospital. You have
to figure out what is making your patient sick. If you don’t do your homework,
your patient will die. If you don’t work your hardest, you’ll get sued! It
starts right here. You have to do your work. You have to study. Because it all
starts here.”

Isn’t that what teachers are supposed to do? Inspire children to work towards their goals, remind them that what they do now is part of the journey towards those goals? The walls in Hekima School have plaster missing in places and the books the students use aren’t brand new. But with a teacher like this, who sees it as part of her job to keep them motivated and keep them hard working—not just to pass a test but to become what they want to become in life, the fancy stuff just seems less important. This is not to say that quality teaching tools aren’t important, just that quality teachers are more important. Somehow we need to invest in the idealism of our teachers.

In the next two classes, I had a bit of a different experience. These were the French classes. I told Teacher Charity how much French I’ve taken, and she asked if I’d like to teach the class. She gave me the lesson plan and sat off in the back of the room. I got to conjugate verbs and explain “ ‘de’ plus ‘le’ becomes ‘du’ ” on the blackboard. It was fun : )

I went to a PE class, too, with a different teacher—Teacher Lydia. We stretched and jogged around the field, played “Teacher Says” (like Simon Says), did jumping jacks and froggy jumps, and played red-light green-light. Teacher Lydia explained to me that some of the kids are not well enough to do PE. She said some of them have been abused and that you just have to be understanding of them.

Unfortunately, not all of the schools in Kenya are probably fortunate enough to have such wonderful teachers like Teacher Charity and Teacher Lydia. Hekima School is private and class sizes never exceed 25 or 30. At the public schools, each class has around 70 pupils, meaning the teachers do more crowd control than actual teaching. Can you imagine having 60 pre-schoolers in one class with one teacher? The local public school has 700 students; Hekima School has about 200. They have the same number of teachers.

Later, we talked to Kate about Hekima Place (this is the home I’m at, not the school) as a non-profit and how it started. She had been working at Nyumbani, a home for AIDS orphans who are HIV+. She worked there for two years and soon began to see that there were many (although not to say nearly enough) resources for HIV+ orphans, but few for the 80% of orphans who are negative. So she decided to start Hekima Place.

She wants it to be a community setting, a family. She won’t give the mums job descriptions, even though they sometimes ask for them, because a mother doesn’t have a job description—she just does everything. Kate wants to avoid an environment like she saw when she was director of a nursing home, where people literally would just step over a dead body on the floor because “that’s not my job”.

Kate also said that if you wanted to start a humanitarian effort, a foreign white person would have much more support than a native Kenyan because there has been so much corruption and so much reason for distrust. People don’t even trust their own communities. How do you rebuild that trust? It takes time, I know. Where do you start, though? I wonder if this is the kind of situation where something like a deliberative forum (www.mathewscenter.org) could be really successful, just to start things off. It wouldn’t be a solution, but maybe if people started talking about why there is distrust and how important and helpful it would be if we could all trust each other more and work together, maybe there would be space to move forward along those attitudes.

Things like this take time, but time in itself doesn’t heal all wounds. People doing the right things, over time, heals wounds. But what are the “right things”?

Something to think about. Kwaheri! (Good bye!)