It takes a village to host an intern. Or such is the generous custom of the people in Bukura. Even in the last weeks I have not gotten used to my being received as such an honorable guest. People still hop up to offer me their chairs whenever I walk into a room, give me extra treats at tea time, and make sure that I always travel places safely and am never ever alone. In the evenings after school when I would go to my host mother’s cell phone shop I would meet many of her friends and people who worked in the neighboring market shops. On our walk home from the shop we would pass by many of the same people each day and greet them. In the mornings when I was walking to school alone they would recognize me and say hi. Or sometimes, in a fantastically uninhibited manner I would hear “Mzungu, greet me!” as I walked past.
Some of the female teachers at school began to call me their little sister. By the third of my eight weeks of work at the school one of the teachers offered to have a dress tailor made for me. So on our walk from school to my mother’s shop after school that day, we stopped by the tailor and she had me choose the fabric. They made it in the traditional Eastern African kitenge style. In the last week when it was completed and I wore it to school, my students told me I looked smart.
Even the students took it upon themselves to make me feel very welcome. One day in Class 5 after we had had some time to ask me questions about the US – during which they inquired of Albert Schwarzenegger, Tom and Jerry, and flying cars – they offered me an orange, some pop corns they had packed from home, some biscuits also brought from home, some mango juice, and ground nuts. Apparently I wasn’t grading their homework harshly enough. Another time when we were at a musical competition, some Class 8 students offered to buy me a myriad of snacks from the vendors who had lined the walkways. Once when we visited the house of my mother’s friend and she found that I liked fish, she sent me home with some hard-to-come-by canned tuna. When early on I expressed a satisfaction with roasted sim sim (sesame seeds) and ground nuts (peanuts), they were almost never absent from the tea table. I am still marveling at the extent to which people supported my being there.
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 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.
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.
