Push.....

Frustration, education, motivation, creation….

It had been an “I hate Botswana” type of morning. As I’ve said, I’m no Susie Sunshine pants, and these times occur. It’s my reality on occasion. I had been at the clinic, and had sat through a meeting in which the doctor (call me simple, call me crazy, call me whatever, everyone else does… but I tend to hold someone who is a doctor up to slightly higher standards, for better of for worse) had complained that there was no “motivation” (read money, t-shirts, food, ect) involved with participation in the upcoming vitamin A campaign.

As soon as the words left his lips the other local staff also began to complain. Perhaps it was the fact that it was Friday morning and it had been a long week, or perhaps I had just reached the end of some rope. Whatever my personal “motivation”, I found myself wondering quite loudly, “I’m confused as to why people want more money for completing tasks that are in their job description, during hours they are already being paid to work?” Wrong statement, as all the staff chimed in with variations of the phrase “Lorato… You’re trying to kill us with too much work.” In reality all the vitamin A campaign meant was that the staff would have less time in the afternoon to sit around in the waiting room and shoot the breeze. For one or maybe two weeks. When I tried to talk to one nurse privately about it later, he actually said very seriously “Lorato, that time in the afternoon is for us to rest.”

Granted, when there are patients the nurses are generally working very hard. There is no concept of appointments for the most part in African medical clinics. Everyone just shows up in the morning and waits until it is their turn. The afternoons are generally quiet, which makes sense in the heat of the day, especially in summertime, unless there is a woman in labor or an emergency. On Mondays the nurses have incredibly long days and get up at the crack of dawn to collect blood, and when patients have to go to the other side the auxiliary staff can spend a great deal of time on the road (for which they are paid overtime). I can see and understand all this.

Most days, however, I stop by there in the afternoon and the staff is just sitting around. I can do this about one day a week, and enjoy it sometimes as it can be a good opportunity to chat with the staff and learn more about the different cultures that I live amongst. More than about one or two days in a week, however, and then I begin to lose my mind, so I’ve begun to spend a lot less time at the clinic. I go in the morning and usually leave for the police or school or mortuary. I’ve found that since I’ve changed my schedule to include being out in the village more it has made me more visible and accepted in the community. More people approach me and bounce ideas off me, and many more go out of their way to greet me even in other villages, which continues to astound my fellow PC friends.

But there’s a little tiny American piece of me that seems to be unwilling to die that believes in order to have something better you must work hard for it and earn it. This sometimes involves sacrifice. It can be tough to work amongst people whom are generally making a few times what I am making monthly and listen to them complain about what they feel entitled to. Especially knowing how much better off they generally are than most of the patients in the village they serve.

I have learned in Seronga that there are some times when I just need to walk away. On this particular day I packed a few thousand pills into individual dosage envelopes and informed the staff I would be going to the school. I had planned to meet with one of the teachers who had proposed marriage to me last week at the ferry (which I denied but suggested we could work on a project together if he could be a professional about it as a consolation… this is how I meet many of the people I collaborate with, unfortunately) to plan how to undertake creating a world map mural on the wall of the primary school.

The teachers at the primary had long been complaining that I only work with the junior secondary school, which they decided was because there is generated electricity there. In reality it is because the older children tend to speak a bit more English, but I agreed, it probably was unfair. So I began to try to think of possible projects to do at the primary school. I’ve learned that if I ask people here what they want to do, they tend to respond “whatever you want to do, Lorato.” I realized I have to be the one that comes up with some suggestions and then let them pick. When I was at the hardware store with a map one day and discovered that some of the women working there didn’t know how to find Botswana on the map that there might be a big, raging need for a map of the world to be displayed somewhere prominently in order to educate the whole village. It’s another pipe dream that this will actually make an impact, but I’ve found in the Peace Corps you gotta live on pipe dreams or you’ll starve. Or go crazy. Whichever.

So I went to the primary school to check my friend France. Despite attempting to slip in unnoticed and not disturb the class in session, my arrival was heralded as though the president himself had made a surprise visit. France, the teacher, who had been sitting at his desk playing with his phone, jumped up and greeted me, introducing me to the students and nearly bowing to me in his excitement. The children appeared to be discussing the day’s topic amongst themselves, and many who recognized me from the village began to whisper to each other more excitedly. I quickly gave up any thought I had had of observing quietly and decided to check how the students were doing with the days lesson.

The topic appeared to be multiplying decimals. As I wandered around the room checking the students work I noticed many, many hash marks on papers and numerous children counting their fingers under their breath. These children were standard fives, which is somewhere between an American 3rd and 5th grader, but many of them were older than typical 5th graders, as it seems that children often start school later in the villages. When a child begins school often depends on if they have any older siblings or family they can stay with in the village as their parents will likely spend a great deal of time away from the village during the year at the cattle post, or lands where they keep their animals and crops. It also depends on if and when the parents can get the money together to pay for school fees. I think sometimes children just eventually reach an age where they can stay in the village and manage to get themselves to and from school ok by themselves. As I checked their work it seemed very few of them knew their multiplication tables. I was horrified, but unfortunately not surprised.

The emphasis on education is increasing on this side of the delta, but there are many barriers to education being effective. School is supposed to be taught in English, which is many of the children’s 2nd, 3rd or even 4th language. Most of the educational materials are in English or Setswana, the country’s two national languages. In a village where many of the parents have a form three (between 8th and 10th grade) or even standard 7 (elementary school) education and their mother tongue may be Sheyai, Simbugushu, or one of the Sesarwa languages, which they may or may not know how to read or write, it’s difficult to expect them to emphasize the importance of education. If the parents haven’t passed away from HIV.

Beating is also common in schools, mostly at the older level, but I believe it also happens at the primary school. I have engaged in many long, exhaustive and completely useless conversations with the staff of the junior secondary school about whether beating is an effective form of discipline. I’ve beseeched them to be more creative in their discipline regimen, and given the teachers suggestions, to no avail. I’d like to be able to say that I had some effect on this practice and somehow knew how to stop it completely or even reduce it but I can’t.

I am ashamed to say that there are days when hearing the sound of the freshly stripped stick whizzing through the air towards some child’s rear end has been more than I can handle and I have to walk away. I’ve had to leave meetings because I can’t stand to hear the children’s cries (“Lorato-they are pretending. They are not hurting. They will be laughing in a minute. You don’t understand our culture. You think we are abusing them but they are very naughty”). I haven’t yet decided if it’s worse to hear the children being beaten or to bear to see the look in their eyes as they come from the room where it happened only to see me walking away. Children are beaten with a switch for coming late, for sniffing glue, for not speaking English amongst other offences. I find it hard to say unequivocally that for as much as I enjoy school and learning that I would want to attend school in Seronga.

These are just some of the things that have become a part of my life here that are hard to effectively describe when people ask questions about life here, or make statements like, “Well it’s Peace Corps, didn’t you expect it to be difficult?” Yeah, I did, but not in these ways.

So back at the primary school, I learned on my visit on this particular day that there are over 700 children at the Seronga primary school. From standard 1-7, there are about 100 children each level. And there is sometimes only 1 or 2 teachers for an entire grade level. Seronga, being far from everything, has proven in every government sector (police, clinic, schools, ect) to be a very difficult place to assign people. And the people that are assigned here are generally pissed off about being here (“Lorato- it’s boring here. How can you stand it here? There are no shops and nothing to do. And it’s far from everything, there’s no electricity and these people are backwards. Eish this place is terrible.”) which doesn’t lend to creating a particularly effective work environment.

So without enough teachers the head teacher told me that they have resorted to splitting the classes in two or three groups and then the teacher will rotate amongst the rooms. The children sit by themselves in between waiting for a teacher. This means that some children have gone entire terms without a teacher and are thus missing many basic skills. Someone somewhere in government has decided to introduce teaching schemes (which from what I can understand about what the teacher tells me sounds like some nightmarish developing world version of “no child left behind.” Except that in this version nearly every child is left behind.) The teacher is given the set of topics for the semester and must cover all of them on a certain schedule. Whether the children have the background knowledge and skills to understand the topics or not.

I briefly spoke to France about this, and his complaint was that the children themselves are just slow, or stupid, or inherently ignorant. He claimed to not have had this experience when he taught children “that side” (which is essentially anywhere that’s not here).

Which is where the lightning struck for me.

Anyone can talk shit about their village, or any other village and God knows I often do. It’s one of the most difficult challenges I’ve found with living in Seronga. To go from one situation that’s irritating or frustrating for one reason and stumble across another that’s alarming for another reason altogether can start to feel impossible. It seems an endless cycle of shittiness. Sometimes it seems as though there are altogether too many tragedies, injustices, and unfortunate conditions happening in one small village to know which one to throw my energy at to try to fix. I’ve called Seronga “the place that God forgot” only partly jokingly. It’s a place that’s very, very easy to lose hope in and I have lost my hope, my faith and myself in several times.

And yet I still find myself here.

Because even though God may have forgotten Seronga, it doesn’t mean that I have.

Somehow in all the craziness and heartache and joy and tragedy of this place it became my place. Seronga challenged me and tested me and pissed me off and somewhere along the way made me fall in love with it. All the things that make me want to run screaming from it are the things that make me know I have to keep fighting for it.

The point of the descriptions above is not just to complain about my life here. It’s an attempt to describe the conditions here not just for myself but to give the situation and the setting of the story for all of those who live it. It’s easy to think of this place in a very surface level “why the hell can’t they get their shit together and deal with this HIV thing” sort of way. I know I’m guilty of it. The picture I’m trying to paint for you is a circular portrait of how I’ve come to understand and deal with my own frustrations about the deeper issues in Seronga.

When I get pissed off and frustrated, I generally find someone who is more pissed off and frustrated than I am, and then try to talk them out of it a bit. It’s a bit ridiculous, but I’ve found it works.

I think any Peace Corps volunteer in any country at some point has to come up with certain strategies to deal with things that at the end of the day are just so very different from home. Like many places in Botswana, Seronga has characteristics that make it frustrating, not just for me as an American, or as an outsider, (but those are personal factors of me that add to my own frustration of the place) but also to those who have ever known anything different, or “better” and this includes other professional Batswana who work here who aren’t from here. Where I am lucky is that I have discovered I am not alone in my frustration. There are actually people living here who are even more pissed off and frustrated than I myself am.

Whether it’s my own uncanny sense of timing or some crazy instance of serendipity, it seems I find these people just when I need to.

Speaking with France something sprung in me when he told me those children were stupid. The fire within me was relit from the embers of disappointment and the faint glow of disillusion with a spark of indignation.

For as often as I might, in a moment of weakness, speculate the same thing about the villagers in my own head, for someone else to say it was blasphemy. These children were from my village, which in African tradition makes them mine. I know for a fact there are many bright children in that room, whether they be book smart or village smart or what. And I know even more that I believe in them.

As France is a man who claimed to want to marry me I decided that I had a quite a bit of leeway in terms of what I could get away with saying to him so I laid into him a bit. I argued that if he indeed were to go back and teach the students at the level they are at instead of trying to go along with the syllabus and teaching them things that were ahead of math concepts they had ever reached, he might find more success. If the children were failing perhaps it was his inability as a teacher and not the children’s inabilities as students that was falling short of the mark. If he tried some new things, or different methods, or went off the beaten government mandated path of teaching he might have better results.

Now generally the tone of the culture here tends to be quite docile and accepting, with a focus on keeping the peace at all costs. Arguments or heated discussions are an exception, they’re very rare, and have a few possible outcomes. It generally either freaks a person out or they’re intrigued by it. Women in particular tend to be relatively subservient here as well, at least in public. (In reality they’re running many aspects of the home, the community and the government… Just under the radar.) My behavior right now was throwing my colleague (or former potential suitor-although in my defense, I tend to give men an extensive list of reasons why they would never want me for a wife almost before they finish the last breath of their proposal of marriage) for a bit of a loop, but luckily my buddy France tended to be in the former group and was open to my somewhat forceful suggestion.

We briefly discussed how we could approach the day’s lesson differently, and he agreed to follow my lead, and we would reteach the day’s lesson in tandem, with him taking over once we got started. With the children I modeled a more gentle approach, working around the room rather than sitting at the desk and getting down near each child’s level. I showed them a different way of multiplying by grouping the numbers without the hash marks, and gave them more time to think through the answer, no matter how long it may take. I watched as not only the children’s confidence but France’s enthusiasm increased. By the end there were still a few children counting on their fingers and using hash marks, but the classroom overall expressed a ton more enthusiasm about the idea of memorizing the multiplication tables by next week. I agreed to come and help him for the rest of the term on selected days if he agreed to try new things (and to not beat the children). I’ve taken to quizzing the children that I recognize when I see them in the village on any number of random multiplication tables, and they have also begun to quiz me, although I think they think I’m some sort of magician when I can answer them immediately without thinking (God bless the American education system.)

In the end in Seronga, we’re all in this together. Sometimes the only way of pulling myself out of a shitty mood and reigniting my own hope is to try to do it for someone else. It was by pushing France to be a better teacher, to expect more from himself and believe more in his students that I managed to pull myself out of my frustration. I’m not going to change everything here, and maybe nothing will change, but perhaps if I keep wearing at the things that bother me instead of letting them wear on me, something good will come. I guess I must just focus on trying to create a moment or two of joy and hope amongst the misery and irritation and will be enough. Perhaps all it can take is a little push.