So yeah, I have definitely failed to be updating consistently. Let's see; I guess a lot has happened in the last month or so! But not too much, really.
Time is flying by, I guess, as I am settling into living here. Right now it's 3 in the afternoon and I am running a class for my fellow teachers on typing. My past peace corps was able to bring some old laptops back with him when he went back to America midway through his time here. Nobody has any experience with typing really even though most have gone through the universities here. They all say they want to type like me. The job is pretty easy because I just sit around reading or doing my own thing once they are started on the typing program.
Teaching is going pretty well. I am teaching SSS1 and 3 physics, and SSS1 and 4 chemistry, but the SSS1 students have not come yet, so my load is really light right now. The SSS1 class' standardized test results have not come back yet, so that is why they are not currently attending school. I end up teaching two classes a day at the most, but this will go up to 4 when the SSS1 students come. I guess they'll be back next term, about 10 weeks from now. The year has three terms, about 12 weeks each. I feel a little bad compared with the workloads of the other teachers, but I imagine I will take on more later. Right now I'm just enjoying the time to get into the hang of teaching. I'm starting to enjoy myself, but only when I'm relatively prepared. My students are pretty serious, and even a bit smart. I sometimes ask them whether or not they want to take the hard route where I explain a lot or the easy one where I just give them something they won't understand, and they take the hard route. I'm pretty happy to oblige them.
Right now there is a lot of dispute with the teachers, particularly the new ones this year, because of money issues. The principal has been unable to get the money needed to pay a lot of them. I think it is the fault of the government in issuing money. Apparently money for teachers generally always comes late. The only reason that people go into teaching is because there aren't any other jobs, and if they aren't doing something, they won't be doing anything besides making working on their farm, which doesn't pay much and is really laborious. So it seems that if you are young and want to make something of your life, you have to be a teacher for a bit, and hope that you'll move up or get a job, or something.
One of the new teachers that has come from Freetown has nowhere to stay, and since I have two spare rooms, I am being forced to allow him to live in them. The rooms are connected to the parlor by a door I've barred closed, so it's pretty much fine. He just moved in. He seems like a decent guy, but I'm still pretty irritated about having to hear him live in my house. I really liked the quiet and the privacy. I'm trying really hard to be comfortable with it, and it's not too bad. I don't feel insecure with it, really. Everyone acts like I should find it unpleasant to live alone, but yeah, culture.
In my SSS3 physics class we are talking about waves, and I am explaining to them a lot of the underlying features of the function describing a wave, and they even seem enthusiastic about it. They come up to the front after class and ask me to explain things again. My SSS4 chemistry class is also pretty fun. We are talking about covalent bonding. It's less exciting than waves, but they still seem pretty interested. I am happy about their enthusiasm, but still lingering in the back of my mind is the idea that these smart, hard working, successful students won't be able to succeed further because of the broken system outside of their control, and the poverty of their families. But I shouldn't think that way.
The school has ridiculous amounts of chemistry and physics equipment that has basically aged and gone to waste over the last 20+ years since the German Baptist missionaries that built the school left. I think they left because of the war. Because of the war, a lot of this country feels pretty post-apocalyptic. In a nearby town there is this big gated establishment called the seed multiplication project. There is a bunch of cool, old genetics equipment just sitting around, and big machines that nobody knows how to use. Everything about the war is depressing. But yeah, I intend to get the labs nice, clean, and organized again. I think just doing this will make the school look very good. This school is considered the highlight of the area, but recently it has been moving down in peoples' minds because of rumors going around about not having teachers. The rumors are only partially true, I think, and it's mostly just payment issues.
The nice chemistry equipment and huge abundance of reagents are pretty tantalizing, so I am learning all sorts of chemistry so that I can better organize things and maybe do some synthesis. Organic chemistry is really neat. The one issue with the lab is that all the rubber has aged and is basically unusable now. I haven't found a place yet that sells tubing, but I'm sure I'll find it somewhere. Otherwise, maybe the glass connections will be good enough. There are all sorts of cool things I can probably do with the stuff, but I am pretty afraid to be handling a lot of it. The physics lab is equally cool, but the problem with it is that we don't have a source of power for the power supplies. Well, maybe we do, but I have yet to work on it. We have a solar panel that we are using right now to charge phones, power the principal's house, and run the laptops. There's a nice inverter for it, so maybe I can get power to the equipment with it.
For the most part life has just been sort of the daily grind with occasional things happening. Language learning has slowed down a lot, and all I feel like doing in my off time is reading, painting, drinking tea, sleeping, or eating. Sometimes I ride my bike. This last weekend I rode 32 miles to the highway and back. It took like 4 hours and I was completely exhausted. It was good, though, and makes me confident I might be able to bike across this country at some point. I want to begin training for the marathon, also. It's this coming May. I think I'm going to enjoy myself here so long as I stay really active. It seems my two primary personal goals are to learn a lot of lots of interesting things, and to be really fit.
I'm reading a lot, which I am really enjoying. Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl was very interesting and I really recommend it. Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist that spent three years in concentration camps during WWII and was able to glean from the experience a pretty profound understanding of human nature. American Gods, by Neil Geiman, was a pretty entertaining and well written novel with an interesting premise. Right now I'm almost finished reading Kafka On the Shore. It's difficult to explain, but I would recommend it. I'm still trying to finish A Brief History of Nearly Everything, which is basically the history of everything from a scientific perspective. This has been a really great book, and I would recommend it to anyone, but it's not exactly brief!
I'm also doing a lot of math and teaching a couple of the teachers some stuff for their exams at university. I've been happy that my school is full of pretty smart people. My fellow teachers are fairly well educated, comparatively speaking. They have interesting things to say and are interested in the things I have to say coming from my own perspective. Their notions about America and the West are a little skewed, but not too terribly. The universities here are western style, so it seems to turn out people that are sort of westernized in their thinking and how they want to act and dress.
One interesting aspect of university life that someone was telling me about was their version of Greek societies. They aren't Greek, but they are what they call camps, and they are pretty similar in a lot of ways. There are different camps for men and women, and they rush if they want to join one, and there is even hazing! An interesting difference is that they serve to elect the president of the university. So, university presidents here are democratically elected. This seems cool at first, but it sounds like it just causes a lot of political problems in the school. The teacher that was telling me about this was the spokesperson for his camp while at university, and so he received the worst treatment among anyone from the other camps. He gave speeches against the candidates from other camps, supporting his own. Apparently he had to have a body guard and basically feared for his life. He had an incident once where people were trying to get into his room. He managed to escape, and the university didn't offer him any protection. It sounds like the camps rule the school by force. There are riots, violence, and it just sounds bad for the learning environment, in my opinion.
Most of the educated people want to go to America, of course. Here, everyone wants to go to America. They ask me if I could get them in. There is the perception that it is much better than here. I try to tell them that it depends, but it is hard to tell people that have worked for a degree that they probably wouldn't be able to get by well. But they ask me about service jobs, like cleaning, and figure if they were able to immigrate they could get a job like that. They probably feel any place is better than this, and that may possibly be true besides for places that have violence and oppression. At least the people here are for the most part free to be poor, instead of being forced into it. But that is only partially true, unfortunately, given the corruption and cutting of money by the powerful people. It's hard. A common saying is 'this is Africa, we suffer here'. I don't really know what the solution is. There just needs to be more business, to provide more jobs. But to have business, you need the support of the government or else have a lot of money. The government is poor because it is terribly managed and corrupt, and the only people that have a lot of money are the ones in the government.
This guy that was in my town for awhile but has now left because the rains have started to stop (not sure I've mentioned him), European traveler dude, is entirely cynical about different aspects of Africans after travelling around the continent for three years. I don't know how to feel about it really. He feels that the relationships you get with people here are not at all the same to those we are used to in the west. There's not really a deep emotional aspect, and you can't trust people because they are always in it for gain. I guess this is how relationships anywhere are, but in the west we have deeper aspects of trust, sincerity, etc. Maybe it's just because he's white. People here are just as complex, I would say, on the surface, as anywhere I've seen. Everyone has a personality. Things are just different in weird ways, and you ask yourself how they are thinking. I don't think there is any sort of fundamental mental difference - somebody born in Africa and raised in western culture would have the same capacities and characteristics as some white kid.
The guy just makes it seem like he thinks they are fundamentally different creatures. And they are, because their upbringing is /totally/ different. It makes you think about all the things that happened in youth to shape who we are, and what makes us westerners. There's a lot of good here, and these people are stronger, physically and emotionally, than most westerners - they have to be because their lives are much harsher than the ones we dealt with. I am so happy for that passport I have in my lockbox, my peace corps ID, my USD emergency fund, my parents sending me things. I am happy I'm going to be here for only two years, and then I get to go back to some posh environment with carpeting and showers.
I went to Port Loko last weekend to go to the bank to get my fat wad of cash and buy some things. It seemed to me that if I wasn't being greeted, people were telling me to give them money or food. That is the case a lot of the time, and it's sort of bothersome after awhile. It's like people aren't seeing me as a person, or appreciating me for anything other than that I have money and food I could give them. A criticism might be that they are only being nice to me because they want something from me. I get that impression from some people, but not all. My village isn't this bad. A group of young boys wrote me a badly written letter where they were asking me to buy them a book. I told them no, I can't, because I can't afford to buy one for everyone. They said I wouldn't have to. Yes, I would. Every time I give somebody something, I can tell that they talk and other people get the idea to come tell me to give them something. But yeah, I don't really like to do these things, because it just gives the impression that I will do it again, and I will eventually have to say no, anyway.
Yesterday I came home and my dog was sitting on the front porch and both of his eyes were completely swollen and horrible looking. I initally thought that he had gotten in a fight and had lost his eyes. Then I thought it was a bacterial infection. Somebody told me I should go buy eye drops, so that's what I did, and figured okay, that's that, he'll be fine after a few days. Then somebody told me that he probably got spit in the eyes by a snake, and that made a lot more sense than a bacterial infection. So I guess my stupid dog confronted a cobra. I wasn't really sure what to do and was pretty distraught about it. I tried to wash his eyes, but he wouldn't open them much at all and it was pretty useless. He still could see it seemed. Today his eyes look much better and he can still see, fortunately. One still looks pretty bad, so I'm wondering whether or not he might lose his vision in that one. I guess we'll see if the venom damages the eyes much or not. I think he'll be fine.
Well, what else? I have been cooking all my meals for myself, besides lunch which I buy from the 'lunch ladies' that come over to feed the kids. I don't cook extravagantly too often. I buy expensive things like bread and granat (peanuts). I've been buying raw granat and then having somebody with the grinding machine mash them up for me. I then put it with sugar, oil, and condensed milk, and it's totally delicious. I think it's got a decent amount of protein. The bread I fry with margarine and put some mayonnaise on it, or eat it fried with the granat. I cook some rice most days, because it's pretty cheap, but it's sort of hard to make good without making a sauce with it, which is a lot of trouble. The lunch ladies have rice with this dry spice mix and oil which is really simple and decent, so I've been making that. I eat a lot. It's the famine season, so I feel a little bad about it sometimes. Apparently during the dry season, which is coming soon, there is a lot of food and everyone is happy. Right now, the harvest from last year is starting to run out, so things are more expensive and less abundant.
I think I'll grow a mustache. I still haven't cut my hair, and I guess I won't, so I look ridiculous. Oh well.
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