On our first day
visiting the orphanage with Deb, Lucy, the Director, asked us if we wanted to “teach”
or “be free”. As I explained in a previous blog, since we did not understand
the question and we are not teachers, we chose the “be free” option. That
lasted until the next day, when we learned that the “be free” option meant
doing chores, which is not really what we signed up for. So, we became teachers
to ten 3-6 year olds.
Despite two storerooms
full of books and other donations from around the world, we had virtually no
supplies. Bear in mind, this is not a school, but an orphanage where one of the
activities was to provide a pre-school education to children who had no access
to a public or private education. One room was filled with donated books of all
kinds, from preschool books to Harry Potter novels and out-of-date
encyclopedias. This room was locked and the only person with a key was Lucy,
who, throughout our stay, was frequently not at the orphanage. The main storeroom
consisted of boxes and boxes of (mostly unpacked) donations of crayons, colored
pencils, workbooks and blank notebooks, coloring books, chalk, modeling clay,
paints….all kinds of goodies. Nothing was sorted and I doubt anyone even knew
what was in the boxes. One day I tried to make some sense out of all of it, but
since I had no shelf space or smaller storage boxes to sort things into, I quickly
abandoned the idea of trying to make order out of chaos. Instead, I chose some
items I thought we could use and took them out of storage. The only person with
a key to this room, besides Lucy, was an Italian man who seemed to be a
business intern, who spent all of his time in the office on his laptop, and who
guarded the key as if it protected gold bars.
Needless to say,
we lacked supplies. Getting my hands on a box of new pencils that still had
erasers on the ends (the kids loved to chew the erasers off the pencils, and
then did not want to use a ‘broken’ pencil) was a huge success, until I went to
look for the one and only pencil sharpener, only to learn that it was locked in
Lucy’s private room, and she was gone for the day. They never threw anything
out……piles of used workbooks stood in stacks all over the place, with names of
children long gone written on the front, and the pages torn and tattered, with
every line filled. We used pieces of broken chalk that were so small we could
barely hold it in our fingers, while boxes of brand new chalk sat in the
storeroom. Finally, I absconded with a small box of chalk and hid it on a top shelf
of the classroom. Finding an eraser for the chalkboard never happened, and even
keeping a dirty old rag around to wipe the board off was a daily challenge. It
made me wonder who needed that old dirty rag every day after we left, and for
what.
Our afternoons became
a time for creating lesson plans for the kids. One day, Rebecca hand drew 10
connect-the-dot pages filled with diagrams for the kids to make their numbers. On
another day, she wrote out sheets with math problems, we stopped at a photocopy
shop in Moshi, and had enough copies made for each kid to get one. We found
stacks of new, unused workbooks in the storeroom one day, and took them home to
label them with their name, month, and subject (Math or English). We did not
discard the old ones, since it was clear nothing got thrown out, but we did put
them aside and used the new ones. We started taking them home at night to write
lessons in them, but were scolded by Lucy for not leaving them at the orphanage
at night.
One day, in our
third week, some other volunteers were in the book storeroom, with all the
books spread out all over the floor, trying to arrange them in some fashion. I
found a couple of early-reader books that I thought would make nice storybooks
for our kids, and I hid them on the top shelf of the bookcase in our classroom.
The next day they were gone; I have no idea to where, but the kids never did
get to hear the Dr. Seuss story, or the Wheels on the Bus. Alphabet and number
flash cards disappeared the same way. It was as if they had all this stuff, but
had to save it for a rainy day. I had heard about this when volunteers bring
donations to an orphanage or school, but here, since they had so much stuff, I thought
it would be easier to make use of some of it. This turned out not to be the
case. Desperate for erasers one day (all the pencils had no erasers and the
kids NEEDED their erasers) I found a packet of erasers in the storeroom. I took
out two of the erasers and pocketed the rest for another day. Within a half
hour, one of the two erasers went missing, surely into the pocket of one of the
kids. My inquiries as to the whereabouts of the MIA eraser went unanswered.
In all fairness,
these kids have NO toys. They played with sticks, blades of grass, the metal
caps to soda bottles or plastic water bottles we would occasionally leave
behind, the gravel that filled their courtyard, the rare lollipop stick, or
empty candy wrappers. Reminiscent of my childhood, when my brother and I made
dirt roads in the spot on the side of our house where no grass could grow, they
needed no toys to entertain themselves (we did have little matchbox cars to
drive on the dirt roads we made). Everything and anything was a toy in the making
for these kids. I found it rewarding to see that kids could still be kids without
the adornments of expensive toys, gadgets, video games and cell phones. I felt
like I was witnessing some purity of childhood or something, a time when
imagination ruled and kids did not need to be entertained by “stuff”. It was
certainly a “back to basics” experience. The day we gave them modeling clay to
fashion the alphabet out of, they all tried to eat it. I cringed many times
when I saw the stuff they put in their mouths, filthy things from the ground,
in a place with no sanitation, no soap, indeed, little water. Is it any wonder they
(and eventually we) were always sick?
So, back to
teaching… we had no teaching materials and no books, but we coped with what we
had. The children could say their alphabet, but when it came to naming a letter
out of order, they could not do it. This was true for their numbers, as well.
Rote memorization was what they knew, so we worked hard at getting them to
actually learn the letters and numbers. It was a challenging process for two
non-teachers. Another example of rote memorization was when the children performed
the “head, shoulders, knees and toes” song, wherein you point to each part of
the body as you sing the song. If I took the words out of order and asked them
first to show me their toes, they would point to the head. Practicing addition
was another challenge: Lucy had them drawing circles to count and add. She
would draw, for example: 00000 + 0000 = which was supposed to represent 5 + 4.
They could count that there were nine circles, but the concept that they were
adding four to the existing 5 never did sink in for most of the kids, even the
ones who seemed to “get it”. Not being teachers, we had no idea how to go about
teaching the concepts behind math. One day we did an internet search to look up
basic math lessons, and found suggestions to use objects of daily living to
have them count and then add them together. We had nothing like that, except
maybe pieces of gravel. No coins, or buttons, or poker chips, not even enough
bottle caps. Besides, they just would have played with them anyway.
However, with
all the challenges and the language barriers that existed between us, we loved
our time spent with these precious children. They always had a smile for us,
and always greeted us with a loud and clear “Good Morning, Teacher, How are you
today, Teacher?” chanted in unison. They wanted to hold hands with us, or sit
in our laps, and would usually “fight” with each other over who got the honors
first. They loved Rebecca, and could not get enough of being with her. Bisuni developed
a game with Rebecca wherein when Rebecca would ask her, in Swahili, what her (Bisuni’s)
name was, she would answer Rebecca. Then when Rebecca asked her what her own
name was, Bisuni would answer Bisuni, and point to Rebecca. This child is three
years old, and could not speak English, but they had this game they played
together and Bisuni knew she was being funny!
One of my
favorites (it is very hard NOT to develop a favorite) was the little girl named
Bright. She is four years old, and is HIV positive. Just prior to the end of
our four weeks, she started on a course of anti-retrovirals (ARVs) to treat the
HIV. She had waited FOUR months to start treatment. This despite the fact that
a retired US physician oversees the medical care of the children at KOC. It is
a lengthy and costly process to obtain the medications needed to treat this
awful disease, one that Bright was born with. The first day after her first treatment,
she was not in class, and I later found her sleeping on the floor. However, after
the second day, she was back, full of energy and with a bounce and liveliness
to her that I had not previously seen. Despite not feeling well, this beautiful
little girl always had a smile for me.
Bright’s little body was covered
in scars and what looked like mosquito bites. She loved sitting on my lap on
the swing, and as we moved in unison she would hum a song, and occasionally add the
words. I have no idea what the song was about, but it was mesmerizing, and I can
still hear her little voice singing in my head. I do not know her story, why
she is an orphan living at KOC, if she has any family at all who could care for
her, or if her treatments will continue.
In a way, I do
not want to know the back-story for any of these children, as it would most
certainly break my heart. I have heard enough stories of other children at the
many orphanages to know that their young lives have been riddled with
heartbreak, loss, and difficulties beyond our grasp. That is enough for me, and
is what calls me back to Tanzania. The past is behind them, but their hope lies
in the future.
“Hope is the
thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the
words, and never stops at all.” ~
Emily Dickinson.
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