I was in the computer room last night when a teacher
called me to say we had a meeting in about half an
hour, 7:30pm. I'm a Classmaster which means whenever
students in that particular class have a problem they
come to me. In practice it means I have to sit
through a class meeting about once a year.
Of course at 7:30 there were exactly five students out
of 5 dozen in the class. But about 45 minutes later
we probably had collected 60% of them and during the
interval I'd managed to sort out that two students had
had immediate family members die recently. So the
whole class had decided to collect some money and buy
them gifts of condolence. Rambirambi is swahili,
though I couldn't figure out if that means the actual
gifts, or the meeting itself. It's not a bad word
either way.
There are two of us who are Classmasters so we sat in
the front of the class with the two Class Monitresses.
The desks were battered and the chairs we were
sitting on were uncomfortable and one looked about to
fall over. Only half of the lights worked (all of
them on one side of the room) which created a lot of
shadows. The other teacher spent ten minutes offering
a standard list of bromides. What I have noticed
(slowly and belatedly) is that language is much more
than the sum of words and grammar. I understood 95%
of the words he said and took almost as much of his
meaning but he said everything in a way that would
never have occurred to me. In some cases he was
simply translating directly from English sayings.
He opened the floor up to students who did much the
same ('Everything is a part of Gods plan', 'Everything
happens for a reason', 'it is not for us to choose but
to accept' etc) and the two students, who by that time
had been called to sit in front also, had the grace to
accept thier condolences politely. Then he asked me
to say something. I didn't really have anything to
say and told him as much. He asked if I understood
what we were doing. At the time it wasn't as clear to
me as it is now (after it was all over we talked for a
bit) and I told him this as well. This brought quite
a bit of laughter. He asked if we don't do this in
America. I explained briefly about the wake and the
church and the food afterward. He asked again if
people don't contribute and I said I don't think we
did. If there are expenses they are covered by
family.
So he told one of the Class Monitresses to distribute
the gifts. She did an odd things, before giving them
out she said exactly how much money was collected for
each person (a little awkward because one person
collected over 50% more than the other) and exactly
how much was spent on each gift. Every shilling was
accounted for.
The contradictions of life here are the interesting
part. In circumstances where accounting would, in my
opinion, be useful, like in public spending, it is
often not done, or done badly or wrongly or done and
promptly hidden from public scrutiny. Several months
ago one paper reported that millions of government
dollars go unaccounted for (and even more are
mis-accounted for) every year. That's a lot of
dollars in a country where half the population spends
$1/day. The front headline in todays paper is about a
'top secret' audit of the multi-national gold mining
companies. According to the Minister of Energy and
Mines these companies didn't want to be audited by the
government and they were obliged. In fact they were
wildly overstating their losses and the reducing their
tax burden accordingly.
But there was no such nonsense last night, the figures
were given exactly. Another things that I don't
understand is that people are occassionaly very strong
(emotionally) while on other occassion just the
opposite. Last month I was talking to a student and
she mentioned that her mother, whom she appeared to be
very close to, was dead. I asked her when she died
and she thought for a moment and then said 'about two
weeks ago'. If you just saw her in class or walking
around school you would never have known. Her father
is in Central Africa working for the UN. Having
families spread out in this way is very common. One
parent working in one city, the other in a second
city, and the children in yet other cities at boarding
school.
And yet yesterday I was sitting on the bus with a
student who had been admitted with malaria. She's had
a hell of a time lately. Just last month she was
admitted for a week with cerebral malaria which made
her mostly incoherent. I asked her if she'd told her
parents that she was in the hospital again and she
replied no because she didn't want to give her mother
'pressure'. It may refer to blood pressure but I
think it's more a reference to the emotional pressure
that accumulates from, I don't know, life. In any
event, she seemed to think of her mother's state as
somehow fragile, and, especially among women, this
seems to be the norm.
Hey, I came here to look for job listings, not to
write. Hope you're all well.
Ryan
Nothing is sometimes a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
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