Certificates

1. Mbambo Emilly, my neighbor. She lives in a house with Mr. Hamusira and his family only few steps away from mine. She's the kid who spends the most time around me because she comes to fetch water from my house several times a day. She also has the highest overall grade (62%) out of 68 kids in grade 9.
2. Haingura Thadeus was the first kid from grade 8B (by far my wildest class) to participate and answer questions correctly in that class. Throughout the year, in fact, even though he sits in and is a key component of the worst behaved group, he's stepped up and set the class straight by explaining the correct answers to my questions.
3. Kambaraha Sabine, who got the highest mark (72% for the year) out of 83 grade 8 kids. She would do this thing when I asked a question where she'd stall and see if anyone raised their hand. If not, she'd raise hers and give, with oozing confidence, the correct answer.
4. Matthew Paulus was one of my favorites from the start. He was one of a handful who talked to me right off the bat and, on a questionnaire I had them complete the first week of class, he was the only one to choose basketball as his favorite sport. Both of these things - him talking to me and liking basketball - are because he's from Rundu, a "town kid". Town kids are known for excellent English because they're forced to actually speak it at school and have access to more sports and activities. The trump card was this: he had come to Sitopogo, 120km from Rundu, to live with and help support his grandmother.
5. Katewa Kalina has always been the most photogenic, or at least the most smiley during pictures. These kids, they love to smile but get a camera in front of them and it looks like they've just witnessed a massacre. She received the participation award for being adorable and helpful all the time. She's the cousin of a few teachers so she's especially good, for example, when kids are rambunctious. She shushes them.


Today I handed out certificates to four kids in each class. It was just a small gesture of appreciation, basically, to those who participated and excelled the most during the year. As is always the case with recognition, it was impossible to recognize everyone I wanted, but at least I could target a few. I began in each class by thanking them for making my time in Namibia so enjoyable. Grade 8A and 8B clapped and cheered, as they're wont to do; grade 9 sat stoically and said thank you in unison ('your welcome' doesn't exist here...only a thank you for a thank you).

The first two certificates (one boy and one girl) recognized learners with the highest overall grade in mathematics. For the second set, I thought of a way to give my two favorite learners in each class an award, so I called it the "Certificate for Excellent Participation". By in large those who received these certificates did indeed participate more than most. It reads:

Certifying that ______ demonstrated an eager desire to learn mathematics. She/he did this by answering and asking questions consistently throughout 2010. Her/his effort made the classroom more lively and engaging for all learners


With the certificates - yellow for highest mark, pink for participation - I included a ruler, a pen and some candy. Small items in high demand at school.

In this country, because there is only one university (the University of Namibia - UNAM) and one set of colleges (NamCol), instead of degrees people accrue certificates to commemorate achievements or training they've completed . For example, when I said I played saxophone throughout high school, they asked me what certificate for music I obtained. My goal is to let some of these kids start their certificate collections.

A Followup

If you missed the last post, skim it quickly, the last two paragraphs in particular.

Mwata Imelda's death is, as interpreted by many, further and probably final affirmation that a certain family is full of witches. After Veikko (the English teacher) gave me a more complete account, I rushed to write it down. Here it is:

There was a quarrel between Mwata and that Siteketa (he points to Siteketa Amalia, grade 8A) a few days before the incident. It's her mother - Amalia's mother - who is known to be a witch. The quarrel was never resolved, leading Mwata's death to be cited by the community as a clear instance of witchcraft, of a hexing. Now the elders are deciding how to proceed; it is known locally that this family has caused other deaths, too.

If the most probable decision is reached by the elders - probable given the prior accusations made against her - Amalia's mother will go before a traditional tribunal to determine if she is indeed a witch. (I asked what method is used to determine this). A potion is made up and given to everyone who is accused; the accusers must also drink the potion. There are two possible outcomes of drinking this concoction. Either you are made violently ill and to vomit or you die. The former is evidence of your innocence, the latter of your guilt.

The problem is many older people die from the potion because it tends to induce a heart attack in people with weak hearts. Nevertheless, the tribunal would view these deaths as substantiation proving rather than disproving that they're witches.

Now, needing to distance myself for sanity sake, I keep quiet and let this movie reel continue rolling. Besides I’m about as integral to this plot as I would be if I was watching an actual movie. So I just sit back, try to ask questions and hope this act, tantamount to lynching, is forestalled.

Four Village Women

PICTURE 1: Doorway to grade 9A, Ngombe Nicolas with his little cousin during break.
PICTURE 2: My grade 9A girl, Himwara Ritha (pink skirt) with some family on their way back from church.
PICTURE 3: Jump rope in the schoolyard with a rope made from stretched out plastic bags tied together.


~ for Mwata Imelda ~


“Some women want to come talk to you about business,” said Mr. Sivera during the English exam last Friday.

“What about business?” I asked, immediately put on guard.

“I don’t really know,” answered Mr. Sivera. “Can they come Sunday after church?”

“Sure.”

Generally speaking, when someone has a inquiry that might be blunt, they’ll raise it via a vague, indirect question that barely relates. So I suspected something suspicious. Around 10am Sunday morning, Mr. Hamusira came to the house with four women in tow. He’d translate, he said, while the women asked me some questions. I greeted them, morokeni (good morning) and they gave me the usual nawa (how are you), to which I replied yee….awo…nawa. Took me a while to get the cadence of that particular greeting down, but I finally got it.

The woman on the leftmost side started, through Hamusira, to give me the background of the story. A while back, they applied to the electrical company through the governing political party, SWAPO, for the company to install a transformer near their cluster of homes. After the application was approved by SWAPO, the transformer and lines were installed, tragically, in the wrong village. In fact, the electricity was installed over 250km away from Sitopogo. So long story short, they need money to help hook their houses up to a transformer the local governing council promised to provide.

A quick aside. One thing you learn promptly at school is how bad and illogical kids’ excuses can be. One of the boys from grade 9B, F. Paulus, told me he was going to miss the mandatory afternoon study session because his brother was eaten by a crocodile the day before. This isn’t necessary far-fetched, so I told him how sorry I was and of course I understood why he had to miss. Turned out to be a lie. So what I mean is, why can’t Paulus think of something more subtle. Like maybe his mom is sick and he needs to cook dinner, or he’s sick and needs to go rest.

So, not that I’m assuming duplicity, I can’t necessarily believe that the electric company made a mistake by putting electricity 250km away from where it was supposed to. It could just be their way of asking me for money. Oh, the women added, the local tribal leader had told them to come ask me because, naturally, I am American and have access to the endless fortune that accompanies such citizenship.

The woman second from the right traced a one and nine zeros on the floor. “That’s NA$ one billion”, I said. “No, they mean NA$ one million (US$ 143,000)” Hamusira clarified. I laughed a little. Oh they’re serious? “Um, that’s a large amount of money. It’s basically impossible to get that much money.” Sometimes my candor can be hurtful here. Hamusira relayed the message, and the women conferred and came up with a revised amount: NA$ 16000 (US$ 2,300). Quite a drop, I thought, from a million.

I tried my best to explain that while, yes, the US is rich, I, a 24-year-old volunteer, wasn’t privy to much of that wealth. They countered with an example of a Catholic mission providing a grant for water and electricity in a nearby village. A mission, I said, is an organization with a foundation of money, while volunteers are individuals without that backing. But, try as I did, there’s no bridge across that cultural divide. Ultimately, it was a humbling moment highlighting the limited extent of my experience.

They left after they agreed to get some more specific information to me (types of materials, cost of materials, location, etc.)

So this morning I talked to my most trusted advisor at school, Mr. Siteketa Veikko, the English teacher. He agreed with my feelings on the situation, stressing that people just don’t know how to compile the information necessary for seeking out such money, which has a lot to do with illiteracy. It was refreshing, as usual, to hear his perspective. Then I noticed kids were lining up for assembly, so I asked him why. Assembly is always Friday morning.

Veikko said it was for Mwata Imelda. “Have you heard?” he asked. “No, heard what.” “Mwata died Friday. She and some other girls crossed the river to Angola and were fishing at a fishing hole. Mwata felt a big fish below her and dove for it…she never came back up. But she can swim. It’s because she was cursed by someone. That family in that group of houses (he points east), they’re witches. Everyone knows it.” He proceeded to list my kids that live at that house.

It was tough to go from such a rational discussion about finding grant money to this. Not to mention the gravity of the story. Mwata Imelda was in my grade 8B class. She had the third-highest year mark (65%) out of 41 kids in her class, fifth among 83 learners in grade 8 altogether. Not only that, but she sat in front and, though shy, participated more than most, smiling big each time. She’ll be missed.

Photo Shoots

PICTURE 1: Mandume Erastus and Hamukoto Arvo, grade 8B.
PICTURE 2: Kameya Greigor, Nanyemba Frans, Marthin Simion and Hamatwi Gosberth, grade 8, with Katewa Markus.
PICTURE 3: Kandjimi Beatrix, Mwendora Didi and Kambaraha Sabine. Notice Did and Sabine sharing the black striped outfit.



It started from talking to other volunteers. In towns, there’s always some place to print pictures, make copies, scan documents, etc. Volunteers at Senior Secondary Schools had begun offering, if kids could pay the NA$6 (~85 cents) it costs, to take pictures and print them in town. At first it sounded like a great idea. But I soon heard horror stories of three to four hour photo shoots during which dozens of kids demanded solo shots, group shots, and variations thereof, or different ‘styles’, as they say.

I knew this would be a problem. Not a problem, I guess, but an inconvenience. It’s one thing to take a few pictures, but that’s not how it works. It’s a million kids asking for photograph of sseveral poses in several places. “Sir, let’s go this side.” “Sir, to the library.” Sir, maybe in the class”. Sir, by the river.” “Sir, at the church.”

It might sound like I’m being grouchy or insensitive; I promise the novelty wears off quickly. I knew that I’d feel that way, so I only started at my school a couple weeks ago. This way, the novelty would last, I hoped, as long as school did – about a month.

At first, it was a slow trickle. Every few days, a couple shy kids would ask if I could “photo them”. But soon the torrent became ten, sometimes twenty kids strong each day. I realized not all of them had money to pay; most just wanted to see their picture on my computer. That was fine, because most of them hadn't pictures of themselves. Still, some tried thinly veiled chicanery, handing me a pile of coins that added up to…NA$4.30. “This isn’t enough, Arvo” I had to say (Arvo is pictured above with Erastus, laughing hysterically). He was a little embarrassed and, for some reason, surprised I’d foiled his plan.

There are 771 kids at this school. Even if I offered one free picture per kid, that would set me back over US$600, so you can understand why I have to demand the full NA$6 for each picture. The pictures above are all results of these long photo shoots. More than anything these afternoon sessions give me a little insight into the dynamic of each clique. The usual older boys come try to take the session over; the usual young boys come to jump in front of almost every take; the usual banter commences between group members as to the location of each shot. I realize this post may not be wholly interesting, but I wanted to describe and document my rite of passage between school and home each day in the afternoon: tending to the gauntlet of kids eager for getting a picture…or 20.

The Heat

Picture 1: Grade 10 kids: l to r Veronika, Ankosi, Klementine and Moses.
Picture 2: Grade 8 girls...bottom right, Katewa Kalina, is a favorite.
Picture 3: Front page of the newspaper I started with grade 9 learners.

These days, the wind is no more relieving than a space heater on full-blast. The breeze acts to destroy the relative cool of my house, ushering 120⁰ air into my 100⁰ bedroom. By 9am, one must actively separate all body parts from other body parts to avoid the sweat that such contact creates. This is especially true when sedentary. Don’t cross your legs. Give up touching your face. In fact, take care to keep the inside of your upper arms from spending too much time touching the sides of your torso. The armpit slick that endures the day will only thicken and, occasionally, drip.

So here I am, spread eagle on my bed to avoid excess sweat, my feet repelling each other like the positive poles of two magnets. I’ve started a newspaper/newsletter/magazine (haven’t decided) club with grade 9 for which kids can write on any topic they wish. In three hours, I’ll receive the final drafts of the stragglers’ articles and begin formatting and generating the inside pages. Pictured above is the design for the front-page with those articles I selected as the headliners. It takes me about this amount of time – three hours – to think through anything in any great depth in this great heat.

Napping in the afternoon is impossible. Maybe if it wasn’t, the days would pass more quickly and the coveted cool of nighttime would come sooner. But during these afternoons, after a few hours of comatose sprawling on my increasingly sweat-soaked sheets, is when I work with grade 9 on their articles. Some are straightforward, the most popular being taking a stance on which artist – Gazza or the Dogg – deserves recognition as Namibia’s finest. Others are more poignant, like those I chose for the front page. And still others are incomprehensible and/or illegible.

Finally, by 5:30 when afternoon study ends, the kids leave and sunset is only an hour away. Unfortunately, this is when my room, formerly a refuge, becomes a veritable bread oven, its 2-foot thick walls spitting the heat absorbed in every direction. As the night air cools, my bedroom temperature rises, fueled by the furnace that encases it. And so begins another sleepless night with each extremity seeking solitude on the furthest corner of the bed. Inevitably, I’ll shift to a dry part of the sheets.

"Can I Photo You?"

Grade 9 Essay: who I want to be when I grow up

The person I would like to become in life I would like to become in my life like the doctors that can I see every day in the hospital. And me also I want to become a doctor because a doctor is a good person even you are sick you can know how can I do to become a health person.

I want to become a doctor for this purpose because of disease. When I will be a doctor I would help many people in the hospital I can not do something make the people angry. When the people come to the hospital I can do them well and quickly. It’s not like in Nankudu hospital (2km from Sitopogo) the nurse of these hospital they have bad behaviour they don’t want to do the person quickly. For me I like to be a nice doctor at all how I can prepare something to do when I will be a doctor.

I want to encourage the people if you see me in the hospital please don’t afraid it’s me. I can help you I’m a good person at all if you don’t know that. When I will be a doctor I can help many people in these country.

Picture 1: Kids playing at the river. Boy on the left is playing with a homemade soccer ball.
Pictures 2: Mshasho...the hand sign for Namibia's most popular musician. At Poppa Falls.
Picture 3. Girls who came to cook. Right to left: Justhina, Reginalda, Amalia, Cesilia, Annecky and Maria, with Regina kneeling.
Picture 4: At school, all loaded and ready to hit the road.

Last weekend, Julius and I led a field trip (second in school’s history) to the Mahango Game Park in Divundu, about 320km east of the village along the river. Justhina, pictured and whose writing is featured above, was one of nine girls from grades 8-10 who joined us to take charge of cooking. With them came 32 grade 4 kids. At 11am, promptly 3 ½ hours after the Ministry agreed to pick us up that morning, we climbed into the bed of an enormous farm truck-turned official Ministry vehicle for a ride to Rundu. There, our mere two errands – the bank and grocery store – took a mere four hours.

“We have 26 rooms booked” Julius told me as we departed Rundu towards Divundu. With two beds per room, that was more than enough. We pulled into the Frans Dimbare Youth Centre at dusk at which time the director, predictably, informed us that all the rooms had been booked. By others. What about our booking? As if he didn’t understand the question, he again said all the rooms were booked. As a consolation accommodation, he led us to two faded green tents, each of which held 11 beds. The kids, completely unfazed by the drastic derailment of our plans, went on to claim their corner of a bed. Similarly undeterred, Julius and I left the kids, none of whom own flashlights, to their own devices in their electricity-less quarters. Only in Africa is the adjustment from sleeping in a bedroom to a tattered tent met with such placidity. Then again it’s not an adjustment if it’s not different from what you’re used to.

Saturday, we headed to Mahango, where we saw hippos, a buffalo, ostriches, elephants, zebras and impalas, not in great numbers like Etosha, but a handful at a time. Upon entering the park, we ran into a group of middle-aged Italian tourists. They were eager to photograph the kids, who obliged happily. Pictures to prove they indeed saw Africans in Africa between stays at various four-star villas. But back in the car, the older girls started making of them. “Can I photo you?” asked Justhina mockingly. “No, very, very no!” chorused the girls, laughing.

When we finished at Mahango it was over 100⁰ and there was no air conditioning in our 1992 Toyota minibus. Only a few km on the way back to the Youth Centre is Poppa Falls, part of Namibia’s main national park network, so Julius and I told the drivers to stop. At the falls, much to the drivers’ chagrin, most kids dunked themselves, making for a wet drive back. And a smelly car the next day. But it was worth it, splashing around in the water to cool off after hours in the car.

Back at Frans Dimbare, the girls began cooking lunch…at 4:30pm. We had eaten breakfast at 7:30am.

Overall, a very successful trip, all credited to Julius who did all the planning. I hardly lifted a finger over the weekend. Chaperoning, a demanding duty in the US, doesn’t mean corral the kids at each interval of the trip. Instead, when we stopped, the kids ran freely, disappearing then reappearing just before we pulled away as if they’d received a telepathic message telling them to return.

On Sunday I returned to Sitopogo with less than two months of classes left and the grade 10 in the midst of Junior Secondary Certificate exams. These exams are hugely significant as they will determine what each will be doing next year. Will they be finishing up grade 11 at a nearby Senior Secondary School, en route to a coveted Senior Secondary School Certificate, the only means by which one can get a stable job? Or will they be irrigating their family’s small plot of maize?

Either way, things are slowly winding down.

Census

Pictures:
1. Victoria Falls, with the falls cascading over the Zambia side of the Botoka Gorge. Across from the falls, in a triangular shape, is the Zimbabwe side. Picture taken from a helicopter ride Adam and I paid for dearly. That red dot near the island in the center (Livingstone Island) is where we went swimming with a guide in a pool on the edge of the falls that stays stagnant after a certain point during the dry season.
2. Zebras at a watering hold in Etosha Park, Namibia.
3. Vista from the toilet at our campsite in Ngepi Camp on the panhandle of the Okavango River Delta in Namibia. Some enjoyable bathroom time, for sure, as there were hippos playing across the river all day.
4. Elephants swimming across the Chobe River in Botswana to an island where there’s more food.

Yesterday at 7:05am, five minutes into period one, Mr. Hamusira knocked on the door of Grade 8A, where I had just begun a lesson on angles, and said all the teachers were meeting in the staff room. The sudden and seemingly impromptu nature of the meeting didn’t surprise me. Indeed most business at school is conducted in this extemporized fashion.


Waiting for us in the staff room were yellow documents from the Ministry entitled “Class-group Information: Annual Education Census 2010”. A set of forms was given to each class teacher, a role parallel to that of a homeroom teacher in the US with responsibilities like taking attendance, distributing report cards, etc. I’m the class teacher for grade 9A so I quickly scanned the questions, becoming first encouraged, then dismayed and disheartened.


The first set of questions was standard: How many kids in your class, male and female? What is the age range of your students? Then came rather significant questions that were, more or less, easy to answer: How many kids, male and female, have participated in HIV/AIDS awareness programs this calendar year? What is the distribution of home languages (18 possibilities, but the mother tongue of most is Rukwangali)? How many textbooks are available per class, per subject? All very important; I was pleased. Because they are black and white questions with similarly straightforward answers, this data is great for the Ministry to have, presumably to help address issues of language instruction or resource supply.


Where the questionnaire threw me for a loop was on page two, under the “Disabilities” category. These questions, in my opinion, are far more profound, requisite for any education initiative - Ministerial or other - related to disabilities in the classroom. The questions, for which we were instructed to tally the number of our students who qualify, read like this:


1.Visually Impaired
- Partially blind, or
- Totally blind
2.Hearing Impaired
- Hard hearing, or
- Deaf
3. Epileptic
4. Behavioral and/or attention deficit disorder
5. Mild or moderate intellectually disabled
6. Severe intellectually disabled
7. Physically disabled
8. Specific learning disorder
9. Autism spectrum disorder

How, I asked several colleagues, should I go about getting this information? “Well, ask the students” was the unanimous reply. Yes, that is how each school assesses the gamut of disabilities present in their student body. Each class teacher goes into their classroom and asks the class, as a whole, who has epilepsy; who is autistic; who has a mild/moderate/severe intellectual disability (remember to specify the level).


So I went into 9A and took an only slightly modified approach by going from group to group (they're seated in clusters of 4-5 kids each). “Okay, does anybody know what epilepsy is?” No. “Has anybody heard of a ‘seizure’”? I write the word on a piece of paper. Still no. Hamwere Beatha from a group in the back has a pocket dictionary on her desk so she looks up seizure, which is defined as “a series of involuntary convulsions.” “Does anyone know what convulsions are?” "No, sir". Not very helpful. Short of demonstrating a seizure on the sandy, stained cement, I was out of ideas. Suffice it to say I didn’t ask the questions in very much detail, focusing on those that produced accurate information more consistently like “What is your family’s home language?”


I was shocked to learn that statistics so essential to education were being gathered in such slipshod fashion. Tenuous at best, falsified at worst, I’d imagine that this data helps define how the Ministry of Education officially views disability issues and thus informs policy. But the look on kids’ faces in grade 9A today was priceless. They shook their heads sheepishly at my questions, laughing and even starting to enjoy my inquiry. When I couldn’t pronounce Kgalagadi, a local language, because it has a click vowel, they giggled. See, while teachers filled out these forms, few taught (including me for four periods) so the kids sat unoccupied in their classrooms from 7am to 1pm. For most, with nothing to do inside a 95⁰ classroom, the survey was a welcome reprieve.