Back to school and forward to hospital
Our habit of leaving a place when it gets to cold forced us to leave Nairobi and enter Mombasa. A few miles south of there we found the beautiful place Msambweni, where we were about to teach. How we always do it remains a mystery even to us, but the first day we entered the village was eventful as normal. First of, we wanted to park somewhere on the beach but ended up on a parking place that belonged to a fellow Dutchman, this man could bring us in to contact with the person how invited us to teach here, so we started of pretty good, without any effort.
A few hours later that day, Minne was admiring a beautiful Landrover, when suddenly a Negro walks out and begins to shout that Noflik is killing his cats. Thats no good, we realize and we get Noflik back. But the man still stands there and is still shouting. Meanwhile, Henk comes in to see whats the trouble. Henk and Minne see the black man raving about and tell him to act normal; we know he has a point, but no need to act like your going berserk. This doesn’t help and he keeps shouting. A second later, a white man comes out. His boss, we reckon and probably a lot more reasonable. But no, the white man begins shouting as well and yells words as ‘trespassing!’ ‘police!’ and more of that. Minne and Henk, used to more harsh words and actions involuntarily start to laugh about the ridicule that seems to be the master of the situation. This doesn’t make the discussion any more civilized, but after a few minutes we promise the shouting comic duo that we’ll leach our dog, after all, they have a point.
When walking away, however, Henk overhears the white man saying to the black just to loud not to notice: ‘Lets go…morons…’. Something snaps and Henk stride to the two man saying that if he is a moron, the white man must be an old prick. The first harmless discussion now turns to a serious stand-off, two man face to face, shouting and cursing one and other. This goes on for a while when the white man grudgingly says: ‘This discussion is ridiculous, instead we could drink a beer together…’ Still pumped with adrenaline Henk growls: ‘Thats a good idea…’ That night we emptied a crate of Guinness and had a lot of fun with Stephens the Irish prick. Good karma or something, you tell us.
Trying to teach
Later that week we started teaching at Vingujini Primary and got in the following situations,
Question: How far is it to Mombasa?
Answer: 50.
Question: 50 what?
Answer: 50 Shilling
Q: Estimate how long this person is.
A: 16 meters!
Q: ‘Pi’ is about 3 1/7, but how much is that?
A: 92
Q: So, who build the pyramids?
A: 20.000
Q: Whats a feature of Europe?
A: Ethiopia
Q: Do you get it? (to the class)
A: No… (almost the entire class)Q: No?
A: Yes!
Q: Yes?
A: No! (And so on…)
Sigh…. This is going to be hard, we realize. The students now about nothing, what might correspond with the teachers that rather don’t spend to much time in the classroom itself, but instead enjoy chillin’ in the teachers dorm annex clay-children-disciplinary-cabin, where evry now and then some children stretch their arms and wait till they can pull out the splinters of another ruler from out of their wrists.
When we’re teaching, we should be accompanied by a regular teacher, but as mentioned above, that rarely happens. We don’t mind though, when there is a teacher, the already shy kids resolve to complete admission and barely dare to speak a word. After several days this projects seems to end in something where we will leave no impression at all after we’ve left, if it were not for the children that seem to dig us after all and show a lot of gratitude. They are silent till the moment you’re about to leave the classroom, then they start to protest your upcoming leave of the class with sentences like; ‘Will you come back after break?’, ‘Don’t go, you have to teach us…. Maths!’ . And so on they make it really hard to actually leave the classroom. When we have left and drive through the one street of the village and hear children shout our name, we pretty much gloat.
Slowly, the few teachers that do understand also come and ask us questions and discuss situations with us, what enlarges our feeling of contribution to the school. It’s still sad thats only a drop in the dessert, as the real problem aren’t the schools but the entire educational system of Kenya. To come to power, the president promised free basic education and made it happen. This looks good, but the country does not have the financial infrastructure to support this, as most money goes directly in to the pockets of the Ministers of Parliament. As said before, teachers rather don’t teach, the level of education drops drasticly while the children have to sit in classroom from 8 PM to 5 AM (or the other way around. What country still uses those silly abbreviations? ) and don’t even have a pen or piece of paper to do something, what together with the continual absence of tutors works numbingly demotivating.
Minne feeling not so well…
To get over these frustrations, we found some means for letting of some steam. Sure there is the beach and the good weather, but what also helps is the pile of Dutch people that crowd the dirttracks of Msambweni with whom we, very Dutch, join with to complain about various things and certain people of certain organisations. To do something different we also arranged a White vs. Black soccermatch where our ADHD man Minne afterwards seemed to have injured himself and needed to be taken to the incredible named ‘Diani Beach Hospital’. Here a doctor examined him and send us to Mombasa, where we were made clear that Minne had to go in surgery right away. A day later we heard that something had start to infect in his upperleg and was now eating its way into his intestines to make its way later to his heart where it would certainly kill him. Thankfully, through our quick intervention, this stayed only hypothetical.
To take a breath from this medical adventure, we took the invitation from the veteran Mr. Fabriek to relax a couple of days in his pretty luxurious beachhouse that complimentary came with a housekeeper and a cook that made us breakfast lunch and diner, that even though we are exquisite cooks ourself, surprised us in its quality, what made us gain a few pounds in the next days. However, we can advise everybody to spend some time in this Sawa Sawa Beachhouse! Now we’re off to drink some tea at our landlord and principal to the local primary school that actually is good and actually believes that there are people in this village that can turn themself into cats at night…
