It’s been a rough week workwise with some controversy over a student’s grade leading to an academic suspension which some of us feel to be unfair and improper (but since we are not a party to these kinds of academic decisions have nothing to say about the matter), add to that the 2nd work stoppage in a month by the faculty at one of the colleges over a money issue which was handled badly by the administration. I’ve spent many hours this week working on transcripts for several of last years graduates from the same college who are applying for graduate school and found that the records are in poor shape, which also affects data entry into a computerized data base one of the other volunteers has made. All in all, a disheartening and discouraging period for us at that particular college at least.
On the other hand, one of the other colleges has invited us to attend and help facilitate their 4 day strategic planning retreat, and also to conduct an assessment of their performance against the last 5 year strategic plan which their board has requested. Their principal is a dynamic leader who could be successful running an organization in the US or other western nation. We also checked in on one of the other college principals who asked us to make a promotional video for him some weeks ago. I shot the raw footage, and John took some still photos. I’m hoping my computer has the power and storage to edit it, but if not it can be done after we get home and sent back. He’s also very visionary, and a delight to work with, so we have to remind ourselves again that we can’t fix everything, and we can only do what we can do, and some of the people we work with are a delight.
On a much brighter note, the flower seeds we planted are starting to bloom along with some of the other plants our gardener found and planted for us, and we took a picture of him kneeling and holding one of them. All the sticks that he put in the ground are full of leaves too – the growth is amazing here with the warmth and rain, and the house looks so nice with the gardens adding color.
My malaria is definitely a memory, and getting more distant by the day. Hopefully I am done with it and John doesn't get it. Since we are moving towards fall and winter here, temperatures are dropping and the high plateau where we are is even cooler with less mosquitoes. When the missionaries settled it in the late 1800's there were no Anopheles mosquitoes here, so no malaria, but the mosquitoes have since moved or adapted to the higher elevations, I suppose another affect of global warming - but we still have a lot less of them here year round, so hopefully we are done with malaria for this trip.
We went to the local primary school this week to meet the headmaster and first grade teacher as our friends from the US will arrive next weekend and we wanted to arrange for him to volunteer there with an eye toward coming back next year during his upcoming sabbatical. The first grade class looked to have about 100 children it sitting at long tables with benches – squished onto every square inch of sitting space. Second grade has about 120 on most days so about 20students have to sit on the floor since there isn’t enough bench space. It’s quite amazing to walk into a classroom like that. The headmaster told the first grade kids to sit and then had them put their hands “up, down, up, down, up, down” to get them attentive and focused, which worked for a little while. The second grade, which is taught by our neighbor, sang us a song.
Those grades are only in school for about 3 hours a day. I’m assuming a part of the reason for that is that they live so far away and need to walk home in time for lunch since the school cannot feed them. It also may be partly because of those large class sizes, and the impossibility of keeping their attention any longer than that in the environment. Anyway, we got there at the time the children were leaving, so they came and surrounded us as we talked to the headmaster in the yard. He said they were wanting candy since so many mzungu give the kids here candy, but despite the fact that we had no candy, soon there was a sea of little shining faces and outstretched hands to shake hands, say hello and greet the mzungu visitors.
John said afterwards that is probably as close as we’ll ever get to the experience of a politician working the rope line, or walking into a crowd after a speech. We must have shaken 50 or more hands each, and in some cases we sought out the shyer kids who you could see wanted to be part of it, but were too shy to come up to us. We left saying that was the place to come to when we needed a little cheering up.
Here’s another cheer up, sort of a follow up to the “humor issue” about language in one of the last blogs. John was showing me the handwritten list we received of items for the “Maize Mill Contation”( fairly easy to guess that is Quotation) and asked me to guess about item # 11 on the list – “Hinches, Rocks, Crew”. I guessed right away that “rocks” must be “locks” cause of the “L” and “R” mix up again, but “hinches” and “crew” had me stumped. John finally figured it out because of the context as “hinges, locks and glue.” There were also some “flame timbers” and “flame nails” which we don’t even notice as incorrect anymore. We wonder if we give them as many laughs as they do us – I’ll bet we do.
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