extracurriculars

Mr. Party and Mrs. Party

Abibu told me it was going to be a "small party that the Senior 6s put on for the younger classes". I thought this sounded like fun and so decided to make the trek to Kinoni on Monday, June 9th despite it being a national holiday with no classes. And now here I was, standing in front of the whole Senior 6 graduating class giving a graduation speech on the spot. The guys were all in cheap, rented suits wearing sunglasses and looking totally gangsta. The girls were all dressed in short skirts or gowns and had fancy hair pieces attached because on a normal day they all have short hair. Some of the mini skirts were very short.  So much for the supposed modesty my guidebook said was a must in Uganda. I spoke into the crackly, $5 microphone and said some brief words about the importance of education and the next phase of life they are entering. Cliche stuff like that.

The person I have befriended at the school and spent the most time with is Abibu. He is the 28-year old art teacher who just finished university and is in his first year of teaching. He has put the most effort into getting to know me and asking questions about life in Canada. But he tends not to explain things very well as evidenced by the fact that he failed to tell me that I would be attending the Senior 6's graduation day that Monday.

I arrived at the school just as the graduating class was arriving. They came in a convoy of Toyota Corollas decorated with streamers and balloons like at a wedding. I walked through the mass of people as they were all climbing out of their cars. I found Abibu and said, "oh, so it's their graduation!" And he replied, "yea I know." Like I said, he's bad at conveying ideas sometimes.

All the graduating students lined up in a procession with all the teachers at the back. The headmistress called me over and had me stand in the procession between her and the director of studies. I didn't really know what was happening but soon we were being ushered into one of the larger classrooms which had been decorated with streamers, balloons, and lights. All the rest of the students in the school were crowded around the entrance to the room, clapping and cheering. As each of of the students and teachers entered the room, the names were announced by the two MCs. The MCs were both Senior 6s and they were yelling names and jokes into the crackling microphones. It was a chaos of noise and confusion.

When I reached the threshold of the door the MCs both paused. I was nameless to most people and even if they knew my name, they still couldn't pronounce it. After a brief pause, the one MC introduced me as "the white man". And the whole school cheered. This is the first time in my life I have felt so white. My roommate Joel is "half black". His dad is from Rwanda and his mom is from Canada. It's weird how wherever you are, you get defaulted to the minority. So in Canada, I am "half brown" and Joel is "half black" because black and brown are minority skin colours and most of the population is white. Here in Africa we are both clearly "half white" because everyone is black. Random side story.

Anyway, all the teachers and the graduating class were soon seated in the room and I ended up sitting at a place of honour beside the headmistress. The rest of the school was pressed up against the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the action. At the front of the room was the "head table". And seated at the table was Mr. Party and Mrs. Party. They were two Senior 6s who had been voted to those positions as an equivalent to Prom King and Queen. On Mr. Party's left was his best man, Mr. Kinoni. On Mrs. Party's left was her maid of honour, Ms. Kinoni. There was a cake cutting, a first dance and a variety of speeches including one from Mr. Party himself.

In trying to simulate a Western-style graduation, it seems they had mixed it up with a wedding reception.

There were also "performances" by various members of the graduating class. These performances usually involved the DJ putting on some Top 40 song and a few students dancing to it and lip-syncing with a microphone that was turned off. Dancing as they would in a club. I think the first dance for Mr. and Mrs. Party was some Beyoncé or Rihanna song and it got very...intimate. And the rest of those in attendance sat there and watched while these two did a great imitation of a sleazy music video on the dance floor. It was awkward.

There were some other great performances including a solid lip-sync of Taylor Swift's "Trouble" and a heartfelt love ballad which one male student lip-synced directly to the stone-faced headmistress. She did not seem impressed.

After about two hours of lip-syncing, grinding and speeches, the headmistress was called upon to give the final speech. Midway through the speech, she suddenly called on me to come up and say a few words. And that's how I found myself standing in front of them all, with a half eaten cake beside me and a tuxedoed Mr. Party looking at me over dark sunglasses.

Banana Discus

Teaching has been a small part of the experience at school and graduation was only one of the many distractions. On Wednesday of that same week, I arrived at school only to realize that all classes had been cancelled because it was student elections day followed by athletics after lunch. They don't have gym class here but rather, on some afternoons, the whole school goes to the football pitch (read: soccer field) to play football, compete in track and field competitions and play other sports.

This is Abibu's favourite day of the week. He got so excited and ran down to the field with a discus in hand long before any of the other teachers or students. The school is a little low on athletics equipment. The discus was made out of dried and compacted banana peels. I'm not sure how it was made, but it was quite heavy and had been fashioned into a pretty good discus shape held together by twine. The shotput was a large and irregular boulder. The javelins were pieces of wood with sharpened tips. And the football was made out of scraps of plastic, tied together into a roughly spherical shape. I was surprised how well it rolled and bounced. But the kids of course didn't care about the lack of "proper" equipment. They were all excited and started playing and competing.

The activity they all got most excited about was sprinting. Students volunteered to run and then lined up at the starting line. They ran barefoot and man, were some of the older students fast. There were two tall and muscular Senior 6s in particular that I swear were doing sub-eleven second sprints down the 100 meter track. They were so fast.

Abibu was the only teacher who participated in the activities. All the other teachers just watched and supervised. He is definitely a class clown and is hilariously non-athletic. He would line up on the sprinting line beside these tall, lean Africans who were a good three inches taller than him. He would run around and trip over his own legs. He's a jokester who treads the fine line between people laughing with him and laughing at him. But I think he enjoys the attention.

Samuel

As all the kids were doing these activities, I was hanging out and was approached by a 23-year old Senior 6 named Samuel. I had first met him on graduation day and he is a very chatty guy who speaks English very well. He is probably the student I speak to most often at the school. He bought me some sugar cane and we both stood around the field, chomping on the delicious stalk and sucking down the sweet juice.

He essentially told me his life story as we stood around on the pitch. I have no way to verify if anything he said was true, but he seemed very sincere. His mom and dad both died when he was quite young and he spent many years in an orphanage; he got involved with a sponsorship organization similar to World Vision and was sponsored by a British woman named Linda. Once in awhile, he would receive letters from her and she helped to pay for his primary school fees which also allowed him to board at the schools. Linda helped him buy a cow through the sponsorship organization. Cows are a hot commodity in Uganda and represent a good investment. Just as he was entering secondary school, she stopped writing and he stopped getting help from her. Samuel speaks with a hint of bitterness and confusion about why the help suddenly stopped. He said he went from secondary school to secondary school throughout the years because he often couldn't pay his fees on time so he would drop out or be kicked out. He has been at Kinoni High School for just Senior 5 and 6.

He is clearly quite a bright guy because throughout all this adversity he managed to get decent grades and speaks some of the best English I've seen at the school. He is also now the class council president for Senior 6 and had been a prefect in previous years. After he graduates, he hopes to go to university to study business but does not know how he can afford it.

It was quite the crazy story and it was very interesting to meet someone who actually received help from a sponsor child organization. There's so many organizations like this and I often wonder if they actually help specific individuals and to what degree. I'm a bit of a cynic about stuff like this so it was encouraging to hear him speak about the help he got from Linda. It is unfortunate that people stop sponsoring probably without much thought of the implications. It doesn't sound like the sponsorship organization really explained what had happened, leaving the kid confused. I don't know why the sponsorship organization didn't remain in the picture after Linda stopped sponsoring him. Samuel didn't really elaborate but it almost sounds like the sponsorship organization dropped him off their roster as well. Maybe he turned 18 and the organization did not support legal adults or maybe they thought he had gotten on his feet and didn't need sponsorship anymore. And there is likely some truth to that because he made it all the way to Senior 6 with good grades and will be graduating this year, which is a lot more than can be said of many Ugandan youth, especially orphans. Despite a little bit of bitterness in his voice at the suddenness of being dropped from the organization, maybe he should be seen as a success story of child sponsorship.

The cynic in me wonders if he's telling me all this in hopes that the mzungu will give him some money. The even larger cynic in me wonders if he's actually fabricating parts of the story to make me sympathize and give him more money. Is that terribly cynical of me? I have met so many "nice" people while traveling who later reveal themselves to just be hoping for a buck.

But I have spent a lot of time talking with him and he is such a nice, sincere and outgoing guy. He's clearly a natural leader and a lot of students seem to look up to him. He has never asked me for anything and it is probably me that has taken more interest in costs of living here as I end up asking about prices and dollar values. I've asked him about costs of school fees and university tuition and he told me his school fees are 57,000 Ugandan shillings per term and there are three terms per year. That's about $25 per term, which is the amount most people spend on a dinner at Earl's back home. He said university tuition is about 1.5 million shillings per year or about $700 CAD. That seems like a massive jump from secondary and it's no wonder that most Ugandans don't attend university as that is completely unattainable for the average income here. Many Ugandans are making less than $100 per month.

I don't want to fulfill the stereotype of the white man who comes, hands out a few 50,000 bank notes and leaves feeling like he's done something. I have taken a liking to Samuel though and I want to stay in touch with him to see if he manages to graduates and makes it to university. Neither email or Facebook are options as he does not have internet access in Kinoni. So the only way to stay in touch is via 18th-century letter-writing. The letter will have to traverse stormy seas with crews battling scurvy and mutiny. Will a letter even make it?

As we were nearing the end of our long conversation, his eyes lighted up as he remembered one gift he once got from Linda but sadly lost.

"It is like a plate that you throw upside down and on a nice day with no wind it can go very far! I really enjoyed it. Do you know these things?"

Uh...yea I do! I love frisbee! Immediately I wished I could find one to toss around with him. This is also clearly why I've taken a liking to him: he didn't even know what a frisbee was but still wanted one.  I'm thinking of sending him a frisbee via scurvy-laden boat with the Ultimate Frisbee rules attached. If I introduce Ultimate to Uganda I feel like some of those athletic Senior 6s could make a fearsome team.


P.S.

Usually I have been trying to post once a week around Wednesday. But this was my last week of teaching and I am spending the next week in a remote village in Bushenyi district about 2 hours from Mbarara with no internet. Marya will still be at the hospital so the next post will be an update on her experiences. She has had a whole different set of experiences than me!

bytes and bad grammer

Dahs Codil

Before coming to Uganda to teach, I secretly had this dream of being called Mr. Darcy by all my students and chuckling inwardly whenever they said it. I saw myself prancing through the halls, speaking in a fake British accent while all the students unknowingly referenced a fictional, 19th century Englishman.

What actually happened: I nervously entered my first class two weeks ago and turned to the blank chalkboard and wrote my name on the board. I said my name clearly with extra annunciation and then turned around to face the class. Blank stares. Confused and scrunched up faces. A few students attempted to pronounce it and awkwardly gave up halfway. I repeated my name and tried to get them to sound it out. More blank stares. I quickly gave up and moved on to talking about Canada and the students instantly brightened and began asking questions.

The teachers did not do any better with my name. The best they could do was "Dahs Codil". And because no one can pronounce my name, I am essentially nameless. The kids call me "teacher" or "sir" and the teachers call me "hey you" or "big man". My dreams of prancing were dashed.

Oddities of the system

Despite my lack of a name at the school, I've now been there for about two weeks and have gotten to know the school. Please remember the implications of that sentence. It means that I have braved the road from Mbarara to Kinoni over 20 times; twice a day for two weeks of work. To be fair, the driver I happened to get on my first day is by far the most reckless (that's not to say that other drivers AREN'T reckless, just LESS reckless). I have also ridden in dump trucks, on the backs of motor bikes, in matatus (small mini vans) and, on one glorious occasion, in a Mercedes-Benz with only one other passenger. Besides the one Mercedes-Benz incident, I have never gone in a car in which there were enough seat belts for all passengers.

When I arrived at the school with Loyce on my first day, I first met with the headmistress. She is a fairly cold woman who runs a tight ship but is very passionate about the school. Despite her aloof personality she is said to be quite understanding to students who cannot pay their school fees on time and she tends to take lots of students under her wing to help them succeed. Her rare smile is very warm and her compliments are very sincere because she does not mince words. She too appears to be nameless. Everyone calls her Headmistress or Madame. On that first day she asked what subjects I would like to teach and I said physics or math. She replied, "okay, you will teach English and computer" and it was very clear there was no room for discussion.

Via this mutual decision, I found myself teaching Computer and English to the two Senior 2 classes. I have about 12 teaching hours per week (3 hours for each English class and 3 hours for each computer class). It doesn't sound like much but between prep time, marking and commuting I'm gone most days for the full day. The Ugandan education system has secondary school going from Senior 1 to Senior 6. Senior 2 is roughly the equivalent of Grade 8 but, in what will be one of many oddities of the Ugandan school system, the kids age is not very consistent across the class. Some students are about 12 years old while the oldest are almost 18. This is due to several reasons: 1) kids start school at irregular times once they have the money to do so. Kids may start at 5 or 6 like in Canada, while others start much older; 2) lots of kids fail and have to repeat grades. I'm not sure if this is due to poor teaching or bad curriculum but one of the most likely reasons is that many of the kids are working or farming to help their families or to pay for school. Thus they can't focus fully on their studies; 3) records of birth are often unreliable so the kids may not actually know how old they are exactly.

All these factors mean that some students aren't graduating secondary school until they are almost 30! The oldest student I have met is 28 and she is (hopefully) graduating this year. It also presents strange circumstances because several teachers are younger than the older students.

When I met Mauricio, the tall computer teacher with pants that are always 2 inches too short, I encountered a second oddity: the computer curriculum. I had anticipated being in a computer lab teaching things like typing skills and Microsoft Office. The school has 30 computers (donated via Ainembabazi Children's Project) but that is not enough for all the students in the class and power is intermittent. Because of these two unfortunate facts, most of the curriculum is centred around computer theory, programming and computer function. Mauricio handed me the notes for the class and told me to simply dictate from them to the students. The school was very lucky to get a guy who watches YouTube videos about binary and ALUs for fun. I love this stuff and have a fascination with the inner workings of computers and the math behind it all. Because of this, I think I have been able to make the class more lively than simply dictation of class notes. However, I question the usefulness of such a curriculum for 13 year old Ugandan teenagers living in a remote, agricultural village. Would it not be better to get all the kids into the computer lab even if they were to share a computer? If the power is out, use the computer theory material as a backup to the more practical hands-on skills. Despite my love of bytes and transistors, this knowledge is not at all practical for these kids and probably bored most of them to tears. None of them will ever need to know about hexadecimal numbering systems and other computer theory concepts except for perhaps the rare student who goes on to study computer programming at a far-off university. But maybe there is some merit to it and maybe it's part of the curriculum in Canada for kids these days. I'm out of the loop with what 13 year olds are learning, whether in Canada or Uganda.

English is stupid

We all know deep down how stupid English is. But it is not until you teach it that you realize just how stupid it really is. It's just so stupid. Every rule has so many exceptions that it might as well not be a rule. There are often many ways to say the same thing and sometimes they have subtle contextual differences that are difficult to pin down. So many synonyms and homonyms and grammatical nuances.

This experience has made me question why "I had learnt to be kind" sounds wrong compared to "I have learnt to be kind". It is subtle differences like this that I have to explain to a group of Ugandan kids with limited conversational English. And, I mean, why say "I have learnt to be kind" at all? Doesn't "I learnt to be kind" have roughly the same meaning? But it doesn't, right? But how would you explain to these kids when it is appropriate or "right" to use one over the other? I don't even know. Does anyone know? I'm pretty sure even Peter, the smiley and energetic English teacher, doesn't have a clue. He handed me the text book the first day and said in a jokingly somber way, "good luck."

I've also learned (learnt?) the names of some grammatical constructions. Perhaps I learnt these things (have learnt?) long ago in elementary or junior high school, but they've long been forgotten. Perfective aspects and past participles are now my specialty. It has been at times embarrassing when I am in class and mix up verbs, nouns or adjectives. The students have a tough time with this and apparently so do I! For example the difference between obedience, obedient, and obediently. Which one is the noun or the verb or the adjective? (Trick question: none of them are verbs). Man, it's just a minefield; a grammatical war zone that would leave my past English teachers shaking their heads in disappointment.

If it's not clear already, English has been a challenging subject for me to teach. But it has nonetheless been enjoyable. It has been great to see the students go from being shy at the beginning of last week to a much more talkative bunch this week. They answer my questions and are very curious about Canada. If I ever run out of things to teach (I am terrible at judging time and never put together enough material for a class) I can simply get them to ask me questions about Canada.

What?

Yes, they can ask questions. Yes, they can answer my questions. But do I understand them?  Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of teaching so far is my apparent ineptness when it comes to deciphering their accent. I'm not only grappling with an accent which includes bizarre pronunciation but also straining my ears to hear them as they often shyly speak barely above a whisper. I ask them to repeat once, twice, three times and by this time the whole class is shouting the word and I'm STILL not understanding. Many times I'll resort to them spelling it out letter by letter.

On my third day, I was teaching students about how a computer stores memory in RAM when one student put up his hand and asked, "what is bahseek?" I didn't understand and asked him to repeat. Soon other students were all joining in until the whole class was shouting in unison, "BAH-SEEK!" I'm sure I looked like a fool as I turned to the chalkboard and had them slowly spell the word "basic" out for me. The question was all the more confusing because it had nothing to do with the material I was teaching; he simply didn't know the meaning of the word and wanted a definition. Many times in the computer class, my lesson lapses briefly into an English class as I explain the definition of some word I've used.

I think I have gotten better at understanding them. This has been helped by them being bolder and more confident in asking the question. But this process of me asking them to repeat, the whole class yelling the word, and me dejectedly resorting to having them spell the word happens at least once a class. Perhaps this highlights my inability to understand the accent but it may also highlight their poor English.

English is the language of instruction in school and yet the students' proficiency of the English language is quite abysmal. All the work in all subjects is submitted in English but, as I soon discovered, the students writing skills are pretty bad and their conversational English is much worse.  Their vocabulary is surprisingly diverse though and I'll admit that there is a huge range in language proficiency. Some kids speak very well and can easily hold a conversation with me while others struggle to say basic greetings (bahseek). I don't know how they pass English class let alone classes like social studies which require reading and writing essays or science classes which involve learning a whole new vocabulary of physics, chemistry or biology. It is partly a generational problem as many of the teachers (including local English teachers) do not have a firm and commanding grasp of the English language. Peter, the English teacher, speaks the best English I've seen but he still makes some errors here and there and prefers to speak in local Runyankore. It is a strange environment when all the teachers in the staff room jabber away in the local language but then go instruct their classes in a non-native tongue. Everyone - teachers and students alike - would prefer to speak Runyankore if given the choice. And as a result of this preference, English remains a weak substitute throughout the country despite it being the official language of Uganda.

The students do seem to understand me quite well though and every time I leave each class they say in unison, "goodbye, sir and have a good day". And then they usually erupt in applause or laughter. That makes me chuckle anyway, even if I am not Mr. Darcy.