“Break’s over,” she sighs.
She’s talking about my planning period. I’m a teacher here, educating the children of the village in our Western ways. Other volunteers aid in the construction efforts, the farming. The hope here is to turn a tent city in the wilderness into a thriving community. If we can get this place in shape, we’ll be connected to the power grid next year. The well is almost done and soon we won’t have to ration water.
I hope so, because I need a shower. Badly.
The school is a prefab building, basically a big shed, or so it looks from the outside. Next to it, a diesel generator chugs to power the computers and lights while a big satellite dish brings us glorious one-megabit-per-second Internet, which is a miracle out here. It’s the only way I can keep in touch with my family, other than my weekly turn on the satellite phone.
If you’re thinking that I’m out here because I wanted to go to the edge of the world and hide, you’re mostly right. No Facebook, no smart phones, no Twitter or Tumblr or blogging or social media or anything of any kind. Simple stuff. I teach from books using old-school methods, and my kids mostly work from a library of donated volumes that grows by five or ten books every time a shipment comes in from the church.
The classroom—there’s just the one—is one of the only structures in the camp that has air-conditioning, and it drops from ninety-five degrees and high humidity outside to a glorious eight-five degrees inside. Any cooler and the generator will blow. We tried that once and sweltered in here for six weeks until replacement parts arrived from the capital.
The kids light up when they see me. They range in age from six to fourteen. Eventually we’ll divide them into two classes but right now there’s no point. We’re teaching all of them the basics. When Melissa and I first arrived, only two of the forty-six children could read.
There are no older children in the school. They’re out working with their parents. They “graduate” when they turn fifteen, so I’m going to lose some. The classes will grow soon. The crèche where three of my colleagues watch the younger children and toddlers while their parents build their new lives has over a hundred kids in it. Most of them are young. Most of the teenagers, two thirds, are girls.
There was a war, and around here they don’t turn you down if you can carry a rifle. There are a lot of old men and young boys here. Even though they’re surrounded by their peers, the boys can’t get enough of me and Melissa. I dress a little more casually than she does, though I still conform to the standards set by the church. That means a sundress. Being treated like a pinup model was flattering for a while but now it’s just tiresome. I have so much to teach them and so little time.
I handle the older kids.
For the most part they speak good English. They started learning when they started school. We’re hoping that by picking up the international lingua franca they’ll be able to find a competitive place in the world. It’s the little things that lift a whole country.
When you’re teaching thirteen-year-olds who can barely read and still can’t handle basic arithmetic, it’s hard to swallow that line of thinking. I want them to succeed so badly, but it’s like staring up the slope of a tall mountain that you have to climb. Nominally the kids are divided by age, but the six-year-olds and the fourteen-year-olds have the same skill level, so Melissa and I end up teaching the class together.
More esoteric subjects like history will have to wait until everyone can read the books. The younger kids are picking it up easier than the older ones. It’s strange to watch them as we break them into groups to read from the English texts we’ve been supplied by the church. You’d think the older kids, especially the boys, would be annoyed with their younger peers, but they submit themselves to tutoring with kids half their age without a second thought, sounding out the words and struggling to pick up what their cousins and younger siblings are doing with ease.
There’s an extra chair at every table. Melissa and I rotate through the room, helping the students with difficult words or just flat-out reading passages to them as they scan along. The little kids eventually give up and listen to the stories. I spend an hour reading Charlotte’s Web to a group of six students, four girls and two boys.