School Days

The new school year started on January 4th and there were some changes for the new term. As previously mentioned, there are three classes in the kindergarten: baby class, KG1 and KG2. During graduation in November, the baby class teacher was extremely late (even for a Kenyan) and barely made it in time for our kids to perform. Since I’d been away at Kilimanjaro, I asked Mary where Teacher Esther was. She told me that she wasn’t sure if Teacher Esther would be in attendance. When I asked why, she said “oh, she’s pregnant.” Oh. Of course.

Since I can be honest with Mary, I asked her how pregnancy = not attending graduation and she explained that she’d been fired because of the pregnancy. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked why pregnancy was grounds for termination and Mary explained that since it’s a Christian school, being unmarried and pregnant was not acceptable and she was terminated. Apparently these rules are laid out as a condition of their employment so she did have fair warning but it is still shocking coming from the US. Of course the school should be able to uphold their standards but obviously it’s not something we’re used to hearing.

So, now we have a new teacher, Teacher Rachel. Mary is teaching baby class and after a few minutes of deliberation on the first day, it was decided that I would continue to help out in KG1. This has two benefits: first, I can help out with the 3 children who are repeating KG1 and second, Rachel is less familiar with the schedule so I can be a help to her. I’m sad to be separated from Mary but it’s nice to make a new friend and I see Mary at every break (3 hours/day).

It turns out that I am able to help out Rachel a lot since apparently she received no orientation or even direction about the most basic elements of our school day. In fact within 5 minutes on the first day, a parent called and she asked if she could call them back. When she hung up, she asked me what time school ended. Seriously, they didn’t even tell you when school ended? And/or you didn’t ask?

No one told her the schedule for snacks, breaks, or how to get school supplies either. She doesn’t know the school prayer or the hymn or even that the term was 14 weeks long. Perhaps most confusingly, no one told her what the children covered in baby class or how the alphabet is taught at our school (there are multiple systems basically revolving around pronunciation, it’s confusing). So, she doesn’t know the name of any of the kids and she thought they were all mute because she was singing the alphabet “wrong” for the first 20 minutes of class. I feel sort of badly because it’s her class but most of the kids know me and she’s deferred a lot of the teaching to me; this causes the kids to come to me with questions and or ask me for permission to do things. It sets up a strange precedent especially since I’m intermittently not there when we travel. Rachel is very happy I’m there though since she has 25 names to learn, two languages to issue commands in, and tons of assignments to write out. So, I’m glad I can be of assistance to her.

I think that it's pretty typical though for her to receive no instructions or training. People aren't all that concerned here with "hitting the ground running" because frankly, nothing is all that pressing to most people here.

The kids are still absolutely adorable and I’m actually practicing my Swahili a lot more. Since it’s the start of the school year, we have more kids who speak only Swahili since they tend to learn more English as the school year goes on. Especially in baby class, the majority of the kids speak only Swahili and I’ve discovered that the best approach is to pretend that I understand what they’re saying even if I don’t. I usually can tell whether they need an affirmative or negative response by their body language so this has worked out quite well. Also, they don’t appeared to be fazed by my asking Mary for a word mid-sentence like I did yesterday when explaining why we don’t throw rocks at each other’s heads.

Anyway, it was great to be back for a few days. M and I headed to Nairobi with our friends for the week to escape the heat and visit a local hospital where there are several missionary doctors for M to meet. It was sad to leave after only 1 week at school but it's a great opportunity for M and today I'm accompanying one of the women to the slums of Nairobi where she does ministry. It's weird to say you're excited to go to a slum but I'm pretty sure it'll be an eye-opening experience. Hope you've all had a great start to the New Year!