Last Week of School

Tuesday June 9th

The weather here is schizophrenic. Sunday I started work on my keyhole garden (see picture above), and it was a little chilly but comfortable enough to work in a T-shirt. Come Monday 2 cm of rain had fallen and was still falling, the surrounding mountains were snowcapped and the wind was blustering. NOT COOL. That is just deceptive and rude.

More difficult than dealing with the cold was that it totally incapacitated my ability to spend the day outside. We are in the last days of finals, i.e. I have to go proctor my last final, and their last final, in 45 minutes, and yesterday I had nothing to do. I finished Freakonomics, an excellent short read that my mom sent me, studied biology, chemistry, calculus, electronic circuits and drew up some plans for an animal powered battery charging station. I still had lots of time to burn, so I ate most of a loaf of banana bread, a few pints of potato soup and ploughed through a Car and Driver.

This is not good if most of winter break is going to consist of miserable weather. I just don’t have the stamina to study all day without any hands on tinkering to use up some of my energy. Let’s all hope that this storm blows through and behind it is some nice 60 degree weather so that I can finish my keyhole garden, and go for hikes, and take pictures.

Wednesday June 10th

The weather has cooperated a bit and slightly relented. It probably got up into the low 40s today, which was nice. Also, the wind died down, which was arguably the worst part of the storm.

Now I’m just waiting for the water to boil for my twice, or thrice, weekly (depending on coldness) winter bath. It is surprising how quickly you just stop worrying about taking baths and changing clothes when it is cold. Actually, it may be a good indicator of general loss of brain function due to the sustained lowering of core body temperature.

Regardless, things are going well here. Like I said, I began my keyhole garden this weekend and was working on it today when my principal stopped by. He was excited to see that I’d started. We have talked about building a keyhole garden for an orphan in each of the 7 villages that are tributaries for students at the school, and when he saw that I had started mine he wanted to actually get started with theirs as well. He asked me to slow down my construction so that we could get maybe 10 students together to help me build it and in so doing learn how to build one of their own. So, when I get back from Confederation Cup (Spain vs. Iraq in Bloemfontein on the 17th) we’re going to get some students together and start work. Many of them literally don’t have anything to do during break, so taking a week or two of their 7 week break to slowly build a keyhole garden isn’t much of a sacrifice. A couple could actually get built. I’ll take pictures.

We also had our first Library Committee meeting yesterday and it went about as expected. Two student committee members were elected and a staff committee member was chosen. Then I asked them to give me feedback on how they wanted the library to operate and what kinds of books they want for it. General silence ensued, slowly followed by me and another teacher prodding them for answers. There is a culture of silence upon any group asked to answer a question in this country, be it a teacher asking students, or the principal asking teachers. The questionees do not respond. A clearly frustrating trait when you’re trying to lead a creative discussion about “What you want YOUR library to look like.” There is a good chance that the students have never had a brainstorming session, so I’ve got to go easy on them. They’ve also never spent legitimate time in a library, so they don’t have any ideas to synthesize. So it goes…

But perhaps the most positive experience I’ve had so far happened on Tuesday. After I proctored my last exam, I was at home trying to absorb heat and mark exams when I got a knock at my door. It was one of my favorite and most self-motivated students. It took a few tries, but he eventually reminded me that I had promised to teach him English. As some background, I sporadically take the best students aside to give them words of encouragement and make lofty promises in the hope that they will actually take me up on it. One finally took me up on it. This specific student, Kemelo, is a double orphan who lives with his grandparents in a VERY small, secluded village about an hour and a half away. Days when he is not in school, he has to take the cattle to graze. This leaves early mornings to meet. So, for 3 our 4 weeks over winter break I will be hiking in the morning cold to Saballa, which is about a 50 minutes hard walk, to meet Kemelo and have some private English tutoring. I find tutoring to be an order of magnitude more fulfilling than teaching students who are not interested, so I’m extremely excited about this development.

Um, I guess that’s about it for now. If you have any questions about life here, or day to day, or what-have-you, feel free to leave me a message. I’ll get back to you ASAP, which might be a few weeks.