development

THE TEACHER IS RI-? RIGHT.

August 15, 2015 By Alexa Carr

A lot of my work at the school is intended to address the learning focus. There is much focus on memorization, memorization, memoriza-? Zation, good. Classes are taught with more emphasis on students being attentive and aligning their answers with the textbook’s or the teacher’s than on the creative, independent thinking that has been so integrated in to my own education. When I said that American high school students only have six or seven subjects at once, my coworkers who must test in and pass 14 subjects in grade 12 liked to try and convince me that the Kenyan school system is much harder than the Ameri-? American, yes. In Class Eight (the age equivalent to the American Grade Eight), students take a national exam which is intended to determine which quality of high school they will attend, the national level schools being the most sought after. Typically students in the city schools perform better on this exam because of better funding, resources, and infra-? Infrastructure, yes good. The rural school at which I was working was a bit of an outlier in that its scores competed with some of the city school’s scores, despite the distance some students had to travel each morning and the lack of incredible buildings or materials.

In order to best prepare for the Class Eight exams, Class Eight students at my school are boarding students. Girls sleep in one of the rooms of the homestead just behind the school field and boys sleep in bunks in a room next door to one of the classrooms. This proximity to school removes wasted time in travelling to and from home every day. They can then begin class by 5am daily and work until 8pm. They have about 3 half hour to hour long breaks throughout the day.

For all students in all class levels, the afternoons are sometimes spent on extracurricular activities such as preparation for music festivals, counseling sessions, debate practice, or computers. But most other times are spent in the classroom copying, reciting, and testing. Homework that has not been checked and signed by a parent may be cause for physical punishment. The snap-snap-snap-snap-snap-snap of the thin cane is heard periodically throughout the day when passing by the cla-? The classrooms. Most students know how to be obedient. Others have budgeted for the certain price of failing to please the differing expectations of certain teachers on certain days.

In part, good scores are encouraged through a public display of student ranking. Biweekly or sometimes even weekly, tests are given. Each test comprises five subjects which take about two hours each. Once the tests have been scored, summed, averaged, ranked on cell phone calculators, and then entered on red-pen lined sheets of graph paper, every student of every grade is called forward during morning assembly in order of their score with respect to their classmates. Good scores are considered the key to a successful future, and bad ones the equivalent of a slow and painful death. The road to hell was the metaphor used by the school’s director during one of the monthly teacher meetings to describe the students who needed more attention.

Not only is competition among the students highly encouraged, but also competition among the teachers. Never before had I considered the worth of a teacher to be so connected to the success of her students. I heard it said that if your students are performing poorly, you are failing them and when they are older and have become thugs will come and destroy your home. When class eights are given gifts to incentivize their numerically high achievement (notebooks for the highest scorers of each subject), teachers are given monetary rewards (200 bob ≈ 2USD for the teacher with the highest scoring pupils in each subject). An emphasis on critical thinking may be lacking, but so too is the guarantee that opting for critical thinking methods would be benefi-? Beneficial.

SCREENS, SHOES, AND SIGNS

August 15, 2015 By Alexa Carr

In the first world there are cautionary measures taken for every nonexistent danger. There are screens to keep out harmless insects. There are filters to filter water that is already drinkable. There are shoes to traverse roads that are smooth as a banana peel. There are yield signs suggesting that maybe you should be cautious when entering a line of rapidly-moving, human-controlled metal cages on wheels. Soon the third world will have these superfluous things too.

Barbara Kingsolver mentions in The Poisonwood Bible that her character who had grown up in the Congo found it strange when she returned to the US and found the curb was painted red because there are so many cars that it had to be designated which are allowed to be parked where. This well illustrates what it means to live in the first world. It’s not so much a series of “taking things for granted” as it is a relatively excessive amount of regulations and precautions.

Now I have returned to the states and am keeping in remarkably constant contact with friends and family I made while in Kenya. Since most Americans have come in to contact with Africans through charitable organizations asking you to feed their children, it is not seen that Africa has smart phones and expensive foreign perfumes and electricity and supermarkets. Certainly the American dollar can purchase more in Kenya than in the America. I hate that my living expenses in one day would support their one week. But soon enough this will no longer be true, because Kenyan workers are quite enterprising.

This may be somewhat counter intuitive to a first glance at the market place. It may seem as though there is much idling. Indeed the supply of boda boda taxis much overcompensates the demand for them as they congregate at the corners and on Sacco stages, sometimes sitting and waiting for hours for a single passenger. And frequently people miss work for multiple-day funerals or other family-functions. But the intent is there, the will to work is very much there.

Since it is much less likely in the rural areas that you will be employed by a larger company, you must open your own shop, or raise and sell chickens and eggs in your yard, or burn bricks on your homestead for building, or build and sell benches, or set up Wi-Fi hot spots to be used with the purchase of a soda, or type and print grant proposals, or sell food in the market or at schools, or taxi people on your motor bike.

In fact, so inspired was I by the convenience and thrill of the motorbike taxis that I got my motorcycle endorsement within a week of being back in the states. “I’m coming home / I’m coming home / Tell the world I’m coming home … The week after I got back / I never felt so strong / I feel like there’s nothing that I can’t try.” Words of wisdom from Diddy. Likely I would never have done this otherwise, nor do I even have the means to purchase and maintenance a bike now to practice. But when I return to Kenya – it will be on a motorcycle. Just in case I’m not stared at enough already.

HOW TO FACILITATE ETERNALLY SELF-PERPETUATING ‘DEVELOPMENT’

August 15, 2015 By Alexa Carr

After my hour long 730 class period is over, a day of self-directed activities begins. Before coming to work in this sustainable development internship position, I thought that I liked to make up my own structure and define my own modes of operation. Now however, I sometimes just wish I would be told exactly what to do. Probably this springs more from a desire to please in this foreign place more than anything else. If I knew what I was doing was something which was commanded of me, I could act with less hesitation in knowing with certainty that what I was doing was what was desired. Then I would be able to return the favor of the incredible hospitality shown to me.

But if I knew exactly what needed to be done this would not be sustainable development. For there is rarely rarely rarely a single identifiable thing that must be done in development work. Before arriving I had no idea how to explain to people what I would be doing here beyond an “internship with the Foundation for Sustainable Development” What is sustainable development? Beats me…recite the foundation’s mission statement. Now I can provide a slightly more thoughtful answer: it’s the art of encouraging self-perpetuating “improvement” without doing it yourself.

In many ways it is like raising a child. The parent himself has already conquered the throws of the terrible twos and the temperamental teens, and now is supposed to relive the experience with his child as some sort of moral guide, patient director, careful cultivator. But the parent mustn’t be too distant or too near lest the child develop an overly secure or underly secure attachment. The parent also mustn’t impose the boundaries of the lesser utilities available to them in their childhood, lest the child be unable to keep up with the inevitably changing environment around them. I.e. it would be a struggle to convince the child to use an old Walkman when she can see her parent has an IPod and Spotify account.

In describing development there is still the problem of defining improvement. Since improvement is not objective, the agent of development must be incredibly careful to get to know the community deeply so that they might work together in achieving a common goal. This goal must be useful, enduring, self- perpetuating, and driven from within. There is some talk of the “mzungu project,” whereby a mzungu (foreigner) comes in and takes on some project in the homeland of another community that simply dissipates once the mzungu has left. This is exactly what I must be sure not to do. In this manner my work here is even better defined by what it is not. It is not building a car with expensive foreign parts that can only be replaced with expensive foreign parts. It is not writing complicated code that is a headache for anyone else to modify. It is not bringing your child’s lunch to her every time she forgets it so that she cannot eat unless you provide for her. It’s a bit of tough love.